iOS 5 beta on track, iPhone 5 launch rumored for early October

The iOS 5 beta is coming along quite nicely. There are obviously some bugs, especially with the iCloud integration, but on the whole the experience is pretty solid so far, much more so than Lion in my opinion. BoyGenius Report is reporting that we should see an iOS 5 beta 8 seeded to developers by Friday. Once the fine devs in Curpertino are happy with the bugs squashed in that beta, BoyGenius is reporting that Apple will push out the Gold Master build some time around September 23, 2011.

The report is also publicly speculating that the Gold Master will make its way to the new iPhone 5 devices “currently waiting for final software in China.”

An alleged deadline of October 5th has been set, and Apple is hoping that carriers will give the thumbs up on the Gold Master before the deadline. The inference is that the iPhone 5 is ready for shippings and product launch, but the only thing holding back an announcement now is iOS 5.

It’s a smart and typical move for Apple. Apple held back hardware upgrades to the MacBook Air, iMac, and Mac mini until Lion was ready to ship. Once the big cat hit the Mac App Store, Apple slowly began rolling out upgrades to their Mac linup, with the obvious exception being the Mac Pro. It was rumored at the time that Apple was so impressed and inspired by Lion that they wanted to make sure new customers were leaving the store with their new hardware already running Lion. The same can probably be said about iOS 5. It wouldn’t make sense at this point to ship the new iPhone without the software update, so you can bet that iOS 5 will ship before or at the same time as the iPhone 5 release.

Source: BoyGeniusReport

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.