Why was there no iPhone 5?

Horace Dediu is an Apple blogger analyst. But that title does him no justice at all. He routinely beats the big banks/analyst with Apple projections and his critical thinking on Apple is second to none.

His thoughts on the smartphone market this year:

The market for the new iPhones could then be summarized as follows: 70 million early generation iPhone users who are eager to upgrade (with 90% probability) plus a subset of a billion buyers of new phones next year who are looking for their first smartphone.

And next year:

The question will be very different a year from now when most early Android buyers will be looking for a new phone and when most iPhone 4 users (all 70 million of them) will be looking for a new iPhone. That would seem like a good time to introduce a new iPhone “5″.

Effectively Apple can easily "win" right now with the iPhone 4S, and then next year when the real battle begins they can drop the iPhone 5 "bomb".