[ansy]

By most accounts the iPhone 5 will not have LTE. That's going to sting with Verizon customers in the United States. While it will probably support HSPA+ on AT&T which is already decently fast, Verizon CDMA is direly slow.

It will be a hard sell to get Verizon customers to pass up LTE for the next two years when there are already a few really good Android phones with LTE and most major cities have LTE coverage right now. Not to mention the many more cities will have LTE in just a few months.

I suppose that is just a sacrifice Apple will have to make. It will not matter for AT&T or most of its other carriers around the world.

[mdasen]

I agree with the sentiment, but to play devil's advocate:

Last quarter Verizon had a couple LTE Android handsets. They sold 1.2M LTE devices (both handsets and modems) while they sold 2.3M iPhones. The iPhone 5 will be coming 1-2 quarters later, but a lack of LTE might not be as big a deal for the majority of users as it is for, well, people who read this site. Verizon should be posting third quarter numbers in a month so we'll see if LTE has taken off in device sales since then.

Likewise, many users might appreciate the battery life of not having LTE. I don't like not having the latest technology or the best processor. However, I know that in my laptop my quality of using it would be better served by lower temperatures than the faster processor that I have. Likewise, I know that I would be better served by a longer battery life than faster web access on my phone (again, a personal statement not necessarily applicable to you). Just as it is a hard sell to get a phone that won't have the new technology and be stuck with it for 2 years, it's also a hard sell to get a device with significantly reduced battery life knowing that batteries will lose a good bit of capacity over those two years. And which is going to be more meaningful to your usage? It isn't a rhetorical question as users have different usage patterns.

--

Frankly, it's a little surprising to me that Apple has waited until October to release an update. I understood why a June/July update wouldn't come with LTE. The chipsets that would offer decent battery life were a good 6-9 months out. However, the Qualcomm MDM9615 (which people have been thinking would be the chipset for the first LTE iPhone) is going to be shipping in samples in "late 2011" and volume in early 2012. That makes the timing a bit harsh. Will this iPhone have a lifespan of 6 months after the last one lasted 15 months? I don't think Apple can wait until October 2012 for an LTE iPhone given that better chipsets are coming soon.

You never know what Apple can pull off. With their cash on hand and chip design abilities, it's possible that it will include LTE. While I don't think the current Verizon LTE lineup offers the size/battery life that Apple would demand to go LTE, the chipsets that would allow that are too close for Apple to be releasing an iPhone that will last an entire year. I can see a non-LTE iPhone selling well through 1Q2012 and not costing Apple too much in terms of marketshare. At the same time, I think a non-LTE iPhone would start becoming a hard sell before the 4th quarter of 2012 (a year from this October).

It's why I'm surprised that Apple didn't release a new iPhone on its normal schedule. A non-LTE iPhone then could have been replaced by an LTE iPhone in the March-July 2012 period and not made those who bought the 2011 iPhone feel like they didn't get at least close to a year before it was replaced.

[protomyth]

I think the wait until Oct is basically and acknowledgment the the iPod / Music event doesn't have the importance it once had so rolling the iPhone into that makes sense.

Also, I wonder if putting the current iPad processor into a phone means that this will be the new cycle.

[scdc]

demand for the iPad 2 made the iPhone5 components (A5 chip) in short supply. I'm guessing the phone design has been finished, and they just were waiting for the supply of components to get better.

[dentton]

All of the Android LTE phones have user replaceable batteries. If the battery loses capacity they can easily be replaced at decent prices which makes your point moot.

[matwood]

Actually replaceable batteries don't make the point moot at all. I certainly don't want to have to carry around spare batteries just so I can use LTE. If LTE is as hard on battery life as suggested, that makes it a very real problem regardless if I can carry around spares.

[nupark2]

I'm a very technology-focused individual, and yet, I only have a passing awareness of what LTE is or why I should care about it. I'm happy enough with 3G as-is, and I'd actually want faster mobile processors before I wanted more bandwidth.

If I'm unfamiliar and ambivalent, I really doubt the public at large is going to even notice.

[rkudeshi]

I'm in the same boat. EDGE speeds were painfully slow, but 3G is more than good enough.

Unless you're streaming from Netflix or downloading large files, I don't think LTE will make much of a difference to the vast majority of consumers.

[eropple]

Netflix streams pretty well over 3G, at least to an iPhone (I would think the quality would be more noticeably ugly on an iPad).

[matwood]

I'm with you. I think the main people who are all over LTE are those that want to replace their hard lines with cell. The problem is that the carriers are going to cap and charge big money for LTE so using it as a primary connection is likely not going to be cost effective.

[technoslut]

On a list of customer wishes, I don't think that LTE is even in the top five. This doesn't necessarily mean that competitors are lacking in those areas compared to Apple. I could argue that iCloud, and the backing up of application data, is more important.

For all of what is being said, no one really knows anything which makes the point moot.

[jsz0]

Between caps, higher prices, and the poor battery life of the first generation of LTE devices, the US carriers have done a really good job making LTE less appealing. I really don't want to pay more to get 4G (up to $10/month for some carriers) when I can't actually use it for more than an hour or so a month at full speed and will be penalized on a daily basis with reduced battery life. I have no 4G coverage here so I will be paying (up to) $10 more a month for absolutely nothing. Pass.

[ben1040]

>I really don't want to pay more to get 4G (up to $10/month for some carriers)

What carriers in the US do that? Verizon has no surcharge for LTE.

Sprint's $10 surcharge started out as a surchage on WiMax phones, but is now a surcharge on any smartphone regardless of what radio it's got.

[diogenescynic]

>By most accounts

Fallacy--appeal to anonymous authority. Whose accounts? The people who get paid based on page views?

>It will be a hard sell to get Verizon customers to pass up LTE

Again a fallacious argument and appeal to anonymous authority. Do most customers even know what LTE is AND do they care about it? Is it really a motivating factor in purchasing a phone and what evidence do we have of this?

[ben1040]

I have a Verizon Thunderbolt, and the battery life absolutely sucks compared to the iPhone 4. AnandTech did a great comparison [1]. The other 3 phones on their LTE lineup are all huge too, with equally bad battery life (maybe with the exception of the new Droid Bionic, which some reviews say has OK battery life but still nowhere near the iPhone 4).

The other dimension besides battery life is size, and all their LTE phones are pretty big size-wise. My Thunderbolt is huge compared to my old Nexus One or my wife's iPhone 4. I don't know if the bigger screen is now what Android manufacturers feel the market wants, but the thing is fairly thick too, and I imagine that's due to having to pack in all the LTE guts.

I think the iPhone, even with 3G, can still hold its own given both the major size and battery life advantages it has.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4240/htc-thunderbolt-review-fi...

[rsynnott]

Wow, hadn't realised it was THAT bad. That's unusable, surely?

[ben1040]

It's pretty awful in the stock configuration, at least unless you disable LTE (in which case why did you buy an LTE phone?) or root it and use SetCPU.

Honestly, it's BS that you need to either root the device or disable its flagship feature to get acceptable battery life out of it. It's annoying enough that depending on what the new iPhone looks like, I'm tempted to bite the bullet and pay full price for it since I'm not eligible for an upgrade.

[ceejayoz]

Plenty of iPhone 1 customers gave up 3G. The phone landscape has certainly changed, but I don't see it as that hard a sell.

[rsynnott]

Very similar problem at the time, actually; UMTS chipsets had terrible battery life, to the point where Nokia actually made some of its Symbian devices in otherwise identical GPRS and UMTS versions.

[Justinwoop]

Plenty of iPhone customers also give 3G by using the device on T-Mobile. There aren't that many of them though compared to the number of people who switched to AT&T (or Verizon) just as there weren't that many people who bought the iPhone 1.

[calloc]

I am one of them. I've got my phone jail broken and on T-Mobile's network so that I don't have to deal with AT&T (unfortunately that is going away).

The EDGE speeds are not half bad actually, when browsing on the iPhone itself they are a tad slow, but over bluetooth to my iPad for example I notice it slightly, but it doesn't really bother me.

[ceejayoz]

iPhone 1 sold pretty phenomenally considering it was a $600 phone, lacked 3G, etc. T-Mobile numbers are going to be dramatically depressed by having to buy unsubsidized and break the carrier lock.

[rsynnott]

It's hard to see how it _could_ have LTE without severely hurting battery life (a big no-no), with current chipsets. And yep, it really doesn't matter that much; in most countries HSPA+ is of far more interest for the time being, and I assume it'll have that. Verizon is a pretty small slice of the iPhone market.

[kyleslattery]

I had a Droid on Verizon for about a year and a half, and I definitely wouldn't call it "direly slow". I'm now on AT&T with an iPhone, and it feels to be about the same speed as Verizon was.

[Duff]

IMO LTE isn't that big of a deal. Fast is ok, but getting hosed by the carriers for the privilege of using it is not so ok.

If I were Apple, I would be focusing on diversifying the carrier portfolios to gain leverage over the vendors for a good data plan. If Sprint is willing to provide an acceptable LTE plan, give them exclusivity, and to hell with VZ and AT&T.