Apple manages to infuriate and delight early-adopters and fence sitters in the last few moments of its special show.
If you were complaining about the iPhone costing too much, today is a great day for you. If you already bought one of the previously-$600 devices, you might want to step out of the room for a moment. Apple has officially dropped the price of their 8GB iPhone by a whopping $200, bringing the phone to $400, the same price as the newly-announced 16GB iPod touch. The 4GB iPhone will no longer be sold at any price.
Of course, in the technology industry, such drops in price are expected, and we're betting that everyone who bought the iPhone at its original price new it was too expensive, and also believed the price might come down. Still, such a dramatic decrease in price little more than two months after the device was introduced is a real slap in the face at Apple faithful.
We actually did not expect a price cut. We believed that the iPhone would see significant feature upgrades to justify the higher cost, as we've seen on other Apple devices. Apple tends to improve features at a given price point, and rarely drops prices on devices. A $200 cut this early is such an insult because it is clearly not the result of diminishing production costs, as was the case with the Xbox 360's price cut. Instead, to early adopters, it feels as though Apple was charging an early-entry fee into the iPhone family.
In any case, anecdotally we've already heard from an indecisive few who are already on their way to Apple stores to buy the now-not-quite-cheap phone. We won't be returning ours, as we bought it on day one, but we will be sneering in the general direction of every Apple store we pass, and we'll certainly change the channel when those (now) stupid commercials come on. Lousy Apple.
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