Dr. Drang, writing six days before the Apple event on Tuesday:

So if there’s no new 4″ iPhone, doesn’t that mean Apple’s giving up on that size? Maybe not.

In moving to a 64-bit processor last year, Apple made a jump in technical specifications that Samsung and HTC still haven’t caught up with. Maybe Apple believes that this head start, combined with a decreasing demand for smaller phones, will allow it to shift to a two-year update cycle for smaller iPhones. In which case, we won’t see a new 4″ phone this year, but we will see one in 2015.

I didn’t get around to reading this until after Apple’s event, and it was a bit of a revelation for me. It doesn’t entirely make sense for Apple to abandon a screen size that has been so successful for them, and there’s plenty of people that are genuinely upset about the larger iPhones being the only new models.

I find the idea of Apple skipping a 4-inch iPhone update this year and returning to it next year to be a very realistic concept (and something I’m willing to champion because it better suits my interest in a 4-inch device). Once the iPod lineup had matured there were certainly years in which an iPod model was skipped over one year only to have a new version released the following year.

As Dr. Drang points out, there are patterns that Apple’s product schedule typically adhere to. But, that’s never stopped them from doing what it thinks is best. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Life goes on. I’ll simply begrudgingly settle on the 4.7-inch model that Apple releases next year.