The fourth and last reason for a June iPhone 5 is "CEO Tim Cook doesn't want to let investors down." Munarriz claims that "Apple probably wants to get its annual iPhone cycle back on historical track [with a June date]." He says that Apple's stock price "fell between late July to late September last year." Which is true, but he has no explanation for why. He simply says that returning to an early summer release would "overcome ... concerns" of investors.

Tim Cook would have to announce an iPhone 5 made out of lead with a rotary dialer to "let down investors." The company's stock has risen from $396.75 on Aug. 1, 2011 (the month that Cook was named CEO) to $633.68 at the close of trading Thursday, April 5, 2012. And most of that gain has taken place since Dec. 1, 2011.

Charles Moore, at iPhone 5 News Blog, seems to agree with the International Business Times that for some reason Apple's Q2 financial results, being announced April 24, "provide a better clue as to whether the iPhone 5 will be released in October or in June." Apparently, the unspoken belief is that if those results showed collapsing iPhone 4S sales, Apple would announce iPhone 5 sooner rather than later.

The one data point that relates to this is Apple's Q4 fiscal 2011 results, which , but were somewhat less than Wall Street expected. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that revenue and profit numbers were dragged down in the last half of the quarter (late summer/early fall) as rumors of the next iPhone reached fever pitch, and consumers held off on buying the current models. But Cook said this fall-off was much less than Apple had expected.

So, as with nearly every obsessive iOSsphere discussion of The Date, we end up where we started: Nobody knows when the darn thing will be announced.