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We have read a number of news articles in recent days, such as the article from Bloomberg, about the arrival of an iPhone 5 in September. It might be a good time to look at what happens in the Apple calendar and how these things work out.

Firstly, Apple have always held an autumn event which focussed on the launch of new music devices. The Christmas market is huge for Apple, and for the past few years they have launched new iPod nanos, touch and shuffle in the autumn, just in time for this peak buying season. This is as predictable as the seasons- September is Apple music device month, and sometimes a new Apple TV may be thrown in for good measure.

Then there is the question of the next iPhone. We all know it will happen, and normally this has occurred in June. There was no new iPhone this summer, and this is probably for two reasons. Firstly, the iPhone 4 is a damn good phone, and remains a strong seller. There has not yet been a noticeable slip in Apple mobile sales, and so the life of the iPhone 4 carries on. Secondly, this summer has been about iCloud, Lion and iOS 5. One thing Apple do so well is to space out product launches, and so mentioning an iPhone 5 in the middle of the WWDC keynote would simply have been a huge distraction. Look at how much press space was dedicated to cloud computing since the WWDC keynote. If an iPhone was launched at this event, this would have trampled all over this useful coverage for other Apple products.

So what of an autumn iPhone launch. Yes, it is very likely as the iPhone 4 launched in June 2010 and so has had a good run. But the CDMA version of the iPhone 4, launched on the Verizon network in the US, is only a few months old. So I see it as more likely that we will get an iPhone which is not radically different to the current iPhone 4, and maybe an iPhone 5 next summer.

However the point of all of this speculation is that we don’t know. Any headline declaring that the iPhone 5 is coming in September is pure guesswork. If you guess enough you are bound to be right some day. But the list goes on: iPhone 5, 8 megapixel camera, edge to edge touch screen, revolutionary tear-drop shape, faster processor inside, etc etc. Someone will be right, many will be wrong, so for now keep a strong sense of scepticism and don’t rely on a September iPhone 5.