Tuesday, 3 May 2011

iPhone 5 in summer/fall says AT&T, white iPhone 4 thicker admits Apple

Want to know the iPhone 5 release date or the real story on the thickness of the white iPhone 4? Ask local retail store employees from Apple and AT&T and you’ll get surprisingly frank answers, although the accuracy of those answers may be suspect at best. In my attempts to replace my black iPhone 4 with a white one today, I visited an Apple Store and then, after it turned out the place was all out of AT&T white iPhone 4 models, an AT&T Store. They were both in the Los Angeles area, but I won’t say which stores specifically so as not to get these low level employees in trouble for what they said. First, it was the very real revelation about the white iPhone 4 from an Apple employee, and then it was a rather odd claim about the iPhone 5 from an AT&T employee. Let’s talk white iPhone 4 first.
With all the various claims out there that the white iPhone 4 is a tiny fraction thicker than the black iPhone 4, I wanted confirmation before I bought one. My concern was that as I frequently use a third party battery case when leaving the house for extended periods of time (Beatweek’s 2010 iPhone battery case of the year, the Mophie Juice Pack 4, if you’re wondering). In short, if the white iPhone 4 was too thick to fit into my favorite battery case, I didn’t want it. After all, if I’m going to make as shallow of a move as to replace one iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4 purely for color reasons, I should at least first make sure I’m not going to screw myself out of being able to use one of my most-often used accessories. The white iPhone 4 display units at the Apple Store are tethered for security reasons, which meant I couldn’t use one of them to make sure it still fit into my battery case. But one employee who was brave enough to admit to me that the white iPhone 4 is in fact thicker than the black model, was kind enough to track down a loose white iPhone 4 within the store. Upon testing it with my battery case we found that it did fit, but just barely. If nothing else this puts to bed the fact that the white iPhone 4 is in fact thicker than the black, and again, just barely. That supposed Twitter direct message from Phil Schiller about them both being the same thickness is, even if it’s really from him, simply not accurate. In any case the store was sold out of the white iPhone 4 model I wanted, so I left empty handed, but knowing for sure that I wanted one. On the way home I passed and AT&T Store and stopped in to take a crapshoot as to whether they might have the one I wanted in stock. They did. But then the iPhone 5 oddly became part of the conversation, and not because I brought it up.

By buying a white iPhone 4 now, most folks are setting themselves up to have to pay more for the iPhone 5 when it arrives, thanks to the magic of upgrade pricing. While it’s not worth explaining here, my situation is different. But the AT&T Store employee who was selling me a white iPhone 4 to replace my black iPhone 4 must have felt sorry for what he thought I was about to do to myself, and said something along the lines of “You know there’s another new iPhone coming in the summer or the fall, right?” He didn’t say “iPhone 5″ but he didn’t have to. Here’s the odd part: there’s no way he had any official information as to Apple’s super-secret plans regarding when it’ll release the iPhone 5. He was probably just repeating back what he’d read online. But why on earth was an AT&T employee trying to talk me into waiting for the iPhone 5? Like I said, I probably just caught him off guard when he saw me replacing one iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4, and he was trying to be more helpful than his employers would likely prefer. The truly odd part is that he seemed to think, for whatever presumed reason, that the iPhone 5 might still come this summer despite the fact that summer is six weeks from now and the white iPhone 4 just went on sale. Like I said, I guarantee this guy has no official inside information about the iPhone 5. Just as the guy at the Apple Store probably didn’t really know for sure that the white iPhone 4 is thicker than the black model until I helped him prove it before his own eyes, but he’d heard enough already to assume it was true. But it’s all worth sharing nonetheless, if only to gain perspective on how the low-level employees on the inside of the food chain are viewing all of this. Here’s more on the white iPhone 4 and iPhone5.

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