I have measured out my life with iPhone launches, as TS Eliot didn’t write. But he might have, if he’d have been The Independent’s technology editor.

There are plenty of other tech events that punctuate the year, of course. Every company hopes its big launches capture the zeitgeist. But the iPhone remains the biggest technology product in the world, and Apple (sometimes, depending on the mood of its share price) the biggest company in the world, and so its launches are probably the biggest moment in the technology calendar.

The actual event happens every September, and so we are about as far from a new iPhone as we can possibly be: the pre-Christmas flurry of discussion and digestion of the new models is all over, and we’re not expecting a new one until autumn. But that’s exactly the time rumours start to fly, and people start thinking about what that new phone might look like.