14 DAY TRIAL // Jefferies Managing Director Peter Misek has released the results of his firms’ latest research, and it doesn’t look too good for Apple in 2013. At least according to the data they’ve obtained from a whopping 400 Asian suppliers.
According to Misek, Apple’s next-generation iPhone will not have a bigger screen and the chassis will be made of plastic. Under the hood, the upgrades aren’t all that impressive either.
The analyst, cited on numerous occasions by the Apple blogosphere, says “we don’t think production is going to start until late June/early July and that’s based on 400+ suppliers that we track.”
“It appears that the lower cost iPhone will be a 4-inch screen Retina display, plastic case, Lightning connector, but some of the componentry seems to be a little lower-end, lower NAND content, or memory [storage], lower processor capability, lower modem, but we would expect the phone to be available for China Mobile, for that TD-SCDMA market,” Misek says in a discussion with Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.”
Pretty convincing stuff as far as the rumored “budget” iPhone is concerned.
But Misek’s data sounds pretty worrying for the iPhone 5S. The analyst says the device will ship with the same 4-inch screen currently found on the iPhone 5, a “broadly-similar” enclosure (likely made of metal), and there’s a chance it will ship in multiple colors.
“We think there’s a chance it could still come in multiple colors, a good chance it gets a fingerprint sensor, and, importantly, we think it’s a virtual lock that you get a better processor and a 12 megapixel camera,” Misek adds.
“We think a lot of the bumps and changes will be underneath the hood, much like they were with the “4S,” he notes, concluding that Jefferies doesn’t see a 5-inch or 4.8-inch iPhone until June 2014.