Game: iPhone 5 release date touchdown sets iPhone 6 stage a year early

“I can’t wait until the iPhone 5 comes out so I can use it to start researching the iPhone 6,” one jokester proclaims on Twitter, but there’s a more than a bit of truth to what he’s saying as the world plays the game of putting more focus on the next iPhone than the current one, with that attention set to immediately shift once the next iPhone has been revealed and all the mystery has escaped of the bag. Apple’s iOS 5 operating system is officially set for touchdown in the fall of this year, and the iPhone 5 is unofficially expected to arrive along with it. And yet the focus being piled on the iPhone 5 (learn more about the iPhone 5) right now might lead some to suspect that the iPhone 4 had already been put out to pasture – and that attention may well be fully passed on to the iPhone 6 once the iPhone 5 is delivered. Here are the various groups whose focus is all about the iPhone 5 (and to an extent, iOS 5) right now despite the product not existing.

The buyers: People who’ve tentatively decided to buy the iPhone 5 are now looking for more info. After all, even after you’ve picked out a car from the lot, you still want to test drive it before officially committing. For would-be iPhone 5 buyers, the “test drive” they’re looking for comes in the form of specs, features, details – and very few of them are known yet for sure. So they keep digging.

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The comparers: The iPhone 6 does play into this after all, albeit directly. Many folks are trying to decide whether to buy an iPhone 4 now or an iPhone 5 later. If they opt for the former, it means they’re effectively shutting themselves out of the iPhone 5 era (in terms of upgrade-eligible pricing, at least) and so they may be hanging onto that iPhone 4 until the iPhone 6 arrives. That’s a tough call to make now, with so little known about the iPhone 5 and literally nothing known about the iPhone 6.

The haters: There are people who get out of bed in the morning for the purpose of expressing as much public hatred for Apple and its products as possible, even going so far as to take retail sales jobs which allow them to attempt to talk as many consumers out of buying Apple products as possible. These people want to know the iPhone 5 specs and features as soon as possible so they can start figuring out how to mislead people into buying their pet Android phone instead. Think these folks don’t really exist? They got their hands on an iPhone 4 prototype early just so they could manufacture the imaginary iPhone 4 antenna issue, which never actually existed but was easy enough to fake with the correctly practiced finger position.

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The insiders: For those people who know just enough about Apple and the iPhone such that their friends and family can’t stop asking them when the iPhone 5 is coming an what it’ll offer, attaining any scant information possible can help deflect such questions – even if the info gathered is sketchy and unsubstantiated. Hence the hunt for details is merely an attempt to stay one step ahead of the questions. Here’s more on iPhone 5.