The truth is, this is getting ridiculous. Frankly, it’s getting exhausting to keep up. The iPhone 5 rumors have been flying around for months, which is fine, but the release date stuff is just getting out of hand during this final stretch.

It is September? Is it August? No, it’s September. Wait, maybe it’s October. How about October 1st? That’s close to September, but still in October. No, it’s probably in September. Or is it? …

Yeesh.

While popular speculation earlier this week was October, it seems that September is is back as the front runner for iPhone 5 release date months. I hope this is right, because the sooner it comes out, the the sooner we can stop worrying about what month it comes out. Then we can focus on the iPad 3 rumors. Is it coming out in January? Next June? Tomorrow? Never? We’ll find out eventually, but I can’t wait to go through this rigamarole with the next Apple device. Or maybe we should focus on worrying about the iPhone 6.

Anyway, the latest on the iPhone 5 rumor front, as mentioned, is that it’s looking like September again. Digitimes is reporting that “Pegatron Technology has landed orders for 10 million units of iPhone 5 to become the second ODM of the smartphone. Shipments will start in September, according to industry sources.”

Charles Arthur at Guardian also makes the case that the October rumors “don’t fit the way Apple operates – nor the details emerging from carriers”.

“Apple’s iOS5, which will obviously power the next iPhone version, is rolling towards a September release,” he says, adding “my carrier sources tell me that the boxes in which the new iPhone hardware is encased have been transported to carriers for testing. This is an important step in the release cycle for any phone….. Either way, the new iPhones are in the system, which means they now just have to get approval – which will probably only take a few weeks at most – and can then be signed off for manufacturing.”

He also quotes Steve Jobs on a past release, as saying, “Every single week before the holidays counts, and we didn’t want to wait two weeks when every week counts with very high volumes.”

It’s a pretty good point. No dispute there.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster made some projections based on a survey of indicating that the iPhone 5’s release will mean huge market growth for Apple (compared to Android). More on that here.