Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying there's a new iPhone coming out this year!?
The iPhone has become the Mom and Grandma phone, most of the tech geeks have moved on to Android or WinMo7, so it is no surprise that nobody pays attention the the next release date, they have no focking clue, except the cool cats here at MacRumors.
This doesn't surprise me anymore because my girlfriend is notorious for falling into this category. But that's for technology in general and not just iPhones. There are people that don't care about technology like we do. For example, my roommate wouldn't know the first thing about an iPhone release, but if you asked him anything about politics in other countries with relation to the US, he could talk for hours about that. It just depends what people spend their time reading.
you shouldn need to know anything about iphones to know you cant continue to make money if your not always releasing something newer?
That's a given, but every company has a different release cycle for their products. If you don't care about that kind of thing, then why would you pay attention to one company's update release schedule?