How this actually works
No person writes anything on this site. A program reads the news, weighs it up and publishes the result. Here is the whole thing in plain English, including the bits it gets wrong — because a tracker that only tells you its good side is not worth reading.
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We read the news, every day
A program fetches the tech sites and manufacturer newsrooms, politely and on a schedule. Almost everything gets thrown away immediately — only articles that actually say something about timing go any further. Roughly one in eight survives.
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We pull out the actual claim
An AI reads each surviving article and writes down what it says: which device, which event, which date. It must also copy the exact sentence it got that from. We then check that sentence really appears in the article — so if the AI invents something, the claim is thrown out before anyone sees it.
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We start from the calendar, not the gossip
Before a single rumour is counted, we already have a decent guess: phone makers launch on rhythms. Roughly the same gap between models, roughly the same time of year. Recent launches count for more than old ones, so a genuine change of schedule gets picked up quickly.
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Rumours nudge that guess — by as much as they deserve
A report is not a fact, it is a measurement with an error bar. If a site has historically been three weeks early, we shift its claims three weeks later before we believe them at all. Vague claims like "early next year" are treated as a stretch of time, not a specific day, so nobody is rewarded for being vague or punished for being honest.
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Twenty copies of one leak is still one leak
When a rumour goes round, we group the articles that are clearly retelling the same story and count the group once. Without this step, a single viral rumour would produce a very confident and very wrong date, every single time.
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When the phone appears, everyone gets marked
The moment a device is officially revealed, every claim ever made about it is scored against what really happened — and compared with what the calendar alone would have said. Beating the calendar is the only thing that earns points. That score is what decides how much we listen to that source next time.
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We cannot quietly change our mind
Every prediction is written down once, fingerprinted, and never edited. Changing our mind means adding a new line, not rewriting the old one — so the full history on every device page is genuinely the history, and anyone can re-check the fingerprints.
What the words on this site mean
Everything here is written to be understood without a maths degree. Just in case:
The five bars
How sure we are. Five bars means we know the week. One bar means it could still move by months. It is the honest width of our guess, turned into something you can read at a glance.
"Reveal"
The day the phone is shown to the world at an event or in a press release. It is usually a week or two before you can actually buy one.
"On sale"
The day units really reach buyers. We predict this separately, and a phone can never be shown going on sale before it is revealed.
"Separate reports"
How many genuinely independent stories are behind a date. Fifteen sites rewriting one leak counts as one, not fifteen.
"Moved 4 days later"
Our date changed since we last checked, and by how much. Red means later than we thought, green means sooner.
"Almost certainly between…"
Eight times out of ten the real date lands inside that stretch. It is deliberately not a single day, because a single day would be a lie.
"From £899"
A price somebody reported, in the currency they reported it in. We never convert between currencies — the moment we did, the figure on screen would be one no article ever printed. Where several sources disagree we show the range rather than pick a winner, and where a price is only known for a bigger storage model we say so instead of passing it off as the starting price.
"Worldwide" and "one region"
Two different questions, and we answer them separately. The list of countries is simply the places reports have actually named. The label above it — worldwide, one region, or not known yet — also says what it is based on: reports about this exact phone, or just how that product line normally launches. The second is a reasonable guess about a brand, not a finding about a phone, and we never dress it up as one.
"Already out"
Once a device has been revealed and has gone on sale, it stays on the front page for a fortnight and then moves to the history. Nothing is deleted — our old guess stays attached to it, so you can check how close we got.
Where we get it wrong
All of these are real. None of them are secret.
- Phone makers change their plans for reasons nobody publishes. When that happens we are confidently wrong until the news catches up.
- A brand-new kind of product has no past pattern to lean on, so its range will be wide until several reports come in. That wide range is honest, not broken.
- Sites that only ever repeat other people rank low here even when they are right. Copying a correct answer is not predicting.
- We can tell you which countries have been mentioned for a phone, but not which ones it is skipping. Nobody writing about an unreleased phone lists the places it is not going, so a country missing from our list means nothing has been said — not that it is out.
- Where a phone is sold is often a guess from the product line rather than from anything said about that particular phone. We label which of the two it is every time, and the headline dates on this page are still the worldwide event.
- Prices here are reported, not predicted. We have no model of how a price moves before launch and we do not yet grade anyone on getting one right, so treat a rumoured price far more loosely than a rumoured date.
- An AI does the reading. Our check catches invented quotes, but it cannot catch a real sentence that was simply misunderstood.
Is the tracker healthy today?
Checked automatically before anything is published. If one of these looks badly wrong, publishing stops on its own rather than putting out nonsense.
870
How much the reader found to look at.
144
Articles that actually said something about timing.
38
Feeds checked on every run.
37
Products with a live prediction.
5.3%
Articles the reader choked on. Lower is better.
1.2%
Calls that failed and were retried. Lower is better.
12.5%
Claims thrown away because the quote was not really in the article.
53 days
How wide the average prediction is, in days. Lower means sharper.
8
43
0.0%
0