Thoughts on iPhone Price Drop
I’m curious what folks think about the price drop, specifically those of you who - like me - are well outside any sort of return/re-shelve/refund window. Are you upset? Couldn’t care less? Do you agree with Jobs that it’s “just technology”?
Personally I think it’s bad form, but not entirely unexpected. I’d like that $200 back, but I believe it was a $600 product then and I’ve made good use of it in those two months. It is a shitty tack for the company to take to burn people willing to take a leap into a new frontier with them, and they will never again see a launch like they had with this phone. There’s also a real potential for new buyers to shy away now, Apple has been notorious for these price slashing prior to a new revision, which is certainly possible (although not probable) before Christmas. Apple has become a consumer product business, and the exemplary customer satisfaction they tout in their marketing and interviews took a hit yesterday. If they keep this up they will be a big consumer electronics business like they wish to be, the kind everyone hates.
The drop also shows a weakness in the market for the product and the overt profit-taking being done upfront. I believe Apple was hedging their bets on demand and wanted to isolate a price point that kept buzz high, demand under control and supplies in-line. To those ends, I feel Apple is struggling with the product (nearly a million sold in 10 weeks doesn’t add up to 10 million in 53 weeks, even with holiday feasting). The price drop is meant to stir interest and grab the remnant buyers out there, but I think ultimately the Touch is going to make the most of the iPhone R&D spending and we’ll see the iPhone go the way of the Newton. My gut says this time next year there will not be a cell phone Apple product on the market.
Am I nuts? Let me hear it.
Also, if you want that “crying baby holding a crying baby” wallpaper click here.
Early adopters will always get bent over. It’s the price you pay to be on the bleeding edge. That razr phone that everyone was drooling about and paying $300+ for a year ago is now a freebie. Sure this is a pretty drastic cut in price in a short amount of time after release, but it’s not completely out of the norm.
I do think you’re right with the Touch being the device that’s going to pay apple back on thier R&D for the iPhone screen, but I do think that the iPhone will be around for a while. Hopefully they’ll run through their contract with AT&T and then simply sell them on their own as unlocked devices that you can take to any GSM network.
Sadly, Clint’s right. Early adopters of mobile phone/PDA/smartphone/whatever-the-hell-they’re-called-now are probably always going to be the most likely to suffer from this phenomenon. How long is the average product life of devices like that? I’d guess somewhere around six to ten months. Price plummets probably halfway through the lifecycle.
I don’t think the touch will have the kind of impact past iPods or the iPhone had. Two things really stick out as problems right now. First is the price-memory ratio. $400 for a pithy 16 GB isn’t going to hack it in a market where the average savvy user probably has four or five times that amount of media that they like to store. (Compare to the largest iPod Classic, which holds ten times the data for $50 less. I can’t surf the web with it? BFD.) Second is that the Touch not only has to compete with the competition’s products, but also the other iPods. Apple would be on much better footing if they just dropped the Classic and focused only on the Touch, which they are probably planning on anyway.
I don’t agree with pricedrops occurring in the Apple world and in the cellphone world, but you both reference drops happening much later than 8 weeks from a product launch.
To your point about the Touch and memory, I think people are more than willing to take the take a reduced capacity device with cooler/better features. Flash memory prices bring what they are, the 8-16MB range is the only way to produce in their current price range. I think it’s pretty smart of Apple to keep the super-capacity devices in the harddrive space while they wait for flash to catch up. Seriously, 80GB is a ridiculous amount of personal device storage. I have a ton of music, 3 2hr+ movies and a healthy dose of photos on my 8GB and am happy as a clam.
$600 was a relatively steep price to pay, even for the innovation offered by the iPhone. Apple no doubt wanted to recoup R&D costs fast in case sales weren’t that hot.
With the relative low price of flash memory at increasingly large capacities, 8GB is kind of sad. That’s especially true on a $600 device. Sure that will change soon, but the size-cost ratio keeps some of us from buying the products. I’d love a Touch, but would have a hard time settling for much less than 15 GB. I’d love an iPhone, but can’t see a reason to pay what they’re charging (plus an overpriced AT&T plan). Tech is great, but not when it fails to be cost effective for the average person.
Of course, even [Fake] Steve will tell you that, “Yeah, we fucked you.”
On the contrary, Apple has reevaluated and is planning to give early buyers $100 store credit. The key is their desire to live up to their own standards, which people were questioning.
Press Release
$100 for my last few weeks with the iPhone?
Sign me up.
Great call on the gift card. Now everyone should be happy.
My personal opinion is that they lowered the price of the iPhone so they would sell FEWER Touch units… if they are the same price, but one makes calls and the other is a portable hard drive, which one is of more value to you? I bought a Sony Mylo a few weeks before the original iPhone announcement because it makes Skype calls, and it came with a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot… as far as I know, yesterday’s announcements didn’t mention anything about free access at Starbuck’s. For that reason alone, the Mylo was worth it and continues to be a superior device, because I can make VOIP calls with it. I’m sure the next rev of Mylo will have touch and lots of the things that make the iPhone so great right now. I waited on iPhone, and now I’ll wait for a touch/wifi device with a camera (does Touch have that?) that can make VOIP calls, and there will be another giveaway like a free year of wifi because they’ll have to keep up with Apple.
[...] my response to Jeremy Harrington’s Thoughts on iPhone Price Drop: My personal opinion is that they lowered the price of the iPhone so they would sell FEWER Touch [...]