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Live from Apple's iPhone 5 event!

Apple iPhone 5 event live blog: up-to-the-minute coverage, direct from San Francisco Event Updates 9:57:14 AM PDT “Ladies and gentlemen, we'll begin shortly.  Please switch devices to silent mode.”

The Verge

Context & Ripple Effects

The event continues a liveblog ritual the corpus traces back through Steve Jobs' Macworld 2008 keynote and last October's 'Let's Talk iPhone' event, where the iPhone 4S launched without Jobs on stage. What is different in 2012 is how little of the announcement survived to the morning: commentary at the time argues Apple's era of secrecy is effectively over, with the iPhone 5's shape, screen size, and connector all widely reported before Tim Cook's team took the stage.

The substance still landed hard across the wire pickups: a 4-inch in-cell display, a 7.6mm aluminum body, an A6 chip that AnandTech identifies as ARM Cortex A15-based, LTE on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, and — the sleeper story — a new 'Lightning' dock connector 80 percent smaller than the old 30-pin port. Pricing moved too: the iPhone 4S dropped to $99, the iPhone 4 went free on contract, and the 3GS was discontinued.

First-order effects

  • Accessory makers built an entire business on the 30-pin dock connector; Lightning makes that installed base obsolete overnight, forcing a retooling of cases, docks, speakers, and car kits ahead of the September 19 iOS 6 launch window.
  • AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon now all sell an LTE iPhone, putting the carrier tier of Apple's lineup on equal footing and giving each a flagship device for the holiday quarter.

Second-order effects

  • Android handset makers competing on screen size and silicon now face an iPhone whose 4-inch display and Cortex A15-class chip close the spec gap they had been marketing against, pressuring their own fall refresh pricing.
  • The free-on-contract iPhone 4 pushes Apple's entry price to zero, squeezing budget Android vendors' cheapest contract devices just as the 3GS exits the lineup.

Third-order effects

  • If pre-launch leaks keep gutting keynote surprises, the value of Apple's events shifts from revelation to confirmation — and the competitive question becomes whether rivals can leak-proof their own cycles or whether the whole industry's launch theater loses its punch.
  • A proprietary connector swap this late into a mature accessory ecosystem signals Apple is willing to reset hardware standards unilaterally, a pattern that shapes how partners plan around every future iPhone generation.

The trend: Apple's annual fall iPhone cadence has become the industry's fixed metronome, with each generation forcing simultaneous resets in carrier lineups, accessory ecosystems, and rival roadmaps.

Related: Apple · iPhone · Apple's 'Let's Talk iPhone' keynote liveblog! · Live from Macworld 2008: Steve Jobs keynote

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