Digitimes released a new report today suggesting that despite the recent coronavirus outbreak in China and the closure of certain Apple facilities in China, the upcoming iPhone 12 and the A14 chip inside it will still be ready for it’s scheduled September release date.
Digitimes also mentioned that Apple have stopped sending engineers to China to check in on the A14 chip development. By Apple doing this, the quality assurance stage of the A14 chips has been temporarily stopped.
As a result of these temporary delays and issues, Digitimes is expecting that there will be a short supply of this year’s iPhones, especially if Apple end up behind the manufacturing schedule due to the Coronavirus outbreak, but there will not be enough of a delay to warrant Apple delaying the announcement of the iPhone 12 in September.
That is all the information that Digitimes have provided for the moment, but I suspect that the iPhone 12 will be like the iPhone X in 2017, where there were very few units available at the time of launch due to Apple being behind on manufacturing. Apple were behind on manufacturing with the iPhone X, so the phone ended up releasing in November 2017 while the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus launched in September.
However, the iPhone 12 manufacturing delays probably won’t be as bad as that. If Apple do have to delay the launch of the phone, I would imagine they would only delay it to around mid to late October.