You do seem very naive when it comes to marketing and especially when you consider that Apple have in recent years become one of the most effective companies in creating anticipation and garnering interest in forthcoming products by keeping everyone waiting!
Keeping people waiting - as a way of making money! Genius! Perhaps they should lock the doors of the stores as another money spinning venture!
Anticipation is great from a point of view of hyping entirely new products. Apple pre-announce new products for this reason. It only hurts Apples competitors.
But when you are replacing an old product with a newer product the dynamic changes. The new product becomes a competitor to the old product - and that "valuable" anticipation does just one thing. It drives down sales for the current product as consumers universally decide to push back their purchases.
Customers who are waiting, don't generate revenue.
I am not saying that Apple *will* announce a new iPhone in March.
But I am saying that a decline in sales caused by anticipation of a replacement product is not good for business and I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple tinkering with the release schedule to maximise sales.
And the nice thing about these discussions is that reality comes along and resolves the argument for us.
If Apple don't release 'till July, I will be proved wrong!
C.
By the way, naive people believe the world is safe and predictable.
Whereas if you think that companies are aggressive and profit driven, I think that is called "cynical".
