Is "just might be" a measure of "truth"? Honestly I find that (unsourced) quote very hard to believe. There's zero manual floorplanning done on Ivy Bridge or Kepler? Really?
Even then "several years" is unspecific, and could mean practically anything from the iPhone classic release era (which is basically ancient history by smartphone technology years at this point) to the (not that old) iPhone 4 release era.