Here is my take on the iPhone price drop…
It is perfectly normal in a product lifecycle to drop the price as the sales volume, and demand lower. This is especially true with cell phones. I feel that this price drop is not among that normal lifecycle. By dropping the price so early in the product lifecycle, it’s just showing consumers how overpriced the phone was to begin with. As an early adopter I feel punished for being first out the gate on the product, and feel cheated for giving Apple my feedback on features I enjoyed, and missed. In good faith Apple should give credit to those who purchased prior to the drop. The credit can be in cash, or maybe even 200$ of credit in the iTunes store (where they will at least recoup some of the credit in profit).
If Apple can afford to drop the price 33% within the first few months of the product release, it means that they gouged the consumer. To me this is illegal, but if not illegal, at the very least unethical. Why will I ever trust to purchase an Apple product again? I bent over backwards to support their iPhone, because I thought it was innovative and had a lot of potential. I talked my company into switching my plan from Verizon where we had a corporate discount, to AT&T where there was no businesss plan available for the phone. I lived through the headaches of the first month of bug fixes where the phone continually crashed, had battery issues, and was almost a beta product. The thanks I get is Apple sticking up their middle finger and yelling “Sucker…”. They should really make it right with those that were early adopters of what was already guaranteed to be a “test phase” of a release.
Apple has touted itself as a company that makes products “for the people”… I’ve always been reluctant to switch to Apple products, I have always refused to buy into their PC market, and I stayed away from the ipod products for the first few years. I felt they had finally got to a point where they were offering innovative, useful, and completely new products to the market, I switched from iriver products to the ipod early last year. The iPhone was a natural progression, ditching my Motorola Q (windows mobile) phone, and my Verizon service (superior data btw). I was perfectly content with the iPhone, happy to have it, anxious to use it everyday, and glad to hear about how easily updates would be rolled out. Today’s news made me want to take it back, go back to my trusty Q where there were no “surprises” or misinformation. Unfortunately now I’m stuck in a 2 year contract with AT&T, and with 600$... excuse me 399$ worth of hardware that I paid 600$ for.
Nicolas Young, IT/IS Director
Los Angeles, CA
Age: 26