WHY APPLE LAUNCHED THE IPHONE 4S INSTEAD OF THE IPHONE 5: “The thinking is that most iPhone 4 owners are still bound by the 2-year contracts they had to enter into when they bought the iPhone 4, so they’ll be less likely to now upgrade anyway . . . . The release of the forthcoming iPhone 5, meanwhile, which presumably will be a more radical upgrade from the iPhone 4, will likely be timed to appeal directly to the ~70 million iPhone 4 owners who will just then be starting to come off their two-year contracts. The iPhone 4 was released in the early summer of 2010. So the two-year window for these contracts will begin to roll off in the summer of 2012 (next June).”