Banking, it seems, isn’t the only career where you can just make crazy sh*t up and get paid for it. Yet again, this week saw an analyst banging the ‘cheap iPhone’ drum. This time, RBC’s Mike Abramsky said we’d see a distinct $99 ‘entry level’ iPhone this summer (source: Silicon Alley Insider).

The things Abramsky claims could appear in the device are pretty funny, and somewhat akin to Apple (a company that, remember, gets off on selling high-quality, high-end products for suitably high price tags) shooting itself in the foot, then the kneecap and then the balls, for good measure. They include:

• A lower-resolution camera. This would require special effort from Apple, as anyone with an existing iPhone will know. The camera is already dreadful. About the only way it could get substantially worse is if Apple removed it entirely, and just made the Camera app snap black rectangles.
• No 3G or GPS, thereby knifing two of the most important aspects of the new iPhone.

To compensate, an updated iPhone would include a screen with 720 x 480 pixels (shoe-horned in, presumably, by someone pushing really, really hard) that would instantly annoy every single iPhone developer and knacker the App Store (given that developers would have to cater for multiple devices), and video.

So, where has this analyst heard the news from? Tim Cook? A recovering Steve Jobs? Nope. He’s just pulled it out of his butt, in the special way that analysts do. This kind of thing wouldn’t be so bad, but people actually listen to these guys. When they say “Apple will release an iMac for $5 that will give you a back massage on demand”, the industry laps it up, and then demolishes Apple when it doesn’t deliver. And these guys get paid lots of money for spouting whatever comes to mind.

Still, I’m sure us mere mortals can take solace in the fact that analysts will probably be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Even before the bankers.