And who wants a stupid iPhone anyway? It really has no voice dialing? How can you dial while you’re driving if there are no keys to feel?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1xXNoB3t8vM

I’m not getting Saturn dealership-hugs from the gang at the Apple store, or asking them to go to movies with me. The only thing that Apple and my friends have in common is that they’re both calling me a whiner for complaining about getting shafted on the cost of a phone. You don’t have to be “friends” with a company to expect it to enter business transactions in good faith. Selling the exact same item to one person for $600 and the next for $400 isn’t good faith. And there’s nothing naive about expecting that from companies. Even big ones.

You keep mentioning that nobody had to buy an iPhone. Holy shit, what a breakthrough! It’s almost as if it were an expensive luxury item! But I missed the ethics class where they said that unfair pricing was okay as long as you were only screwing people who could afford it.

You keep saying that people were willing to pay the original price. I keep pointing out that being willing to pay that (I sure wasn’t happy about it, and I’ve got a tirade on this website to prove it) had the implicit assumption that Apple was selling it at the best price point they could manage. And that’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, based on their past history of innovation in technology, rate at which the new stuff comes out, percentage of price cuts, etc. For the fourth time: cutting 1/3 off the price of a major item two months after release is unprecedented for the company.

You act like it’s a bunch of Apple fanboys lounging on Nob Hill moaning that their diamond shoes are too tight. Apparently there’s no middle ground between drooling fanboys who think that Jobs is their best friend ever and throw money around which they should be giving to charity, and people who just expect the company to treat us fairly based on past history. What about those of us who just buy Apple stuff because it’s traditionally been the best combination of hardware and software design, well built, easy to use, enjoyable to use, and as close to an everything-comes-included appliance as you can get in tech these days? Those of us who are so fashion-backwards the idea that we’d buy the thing as a status symbol is ludicrous?

And apparently I’m supposed to believe that “Big” is synonymous with “Evil;” am I complicit in evil because I go into transactions knowing that Apple makes a profit on the stuff I buy? Or am I just naive because I expect that to be a reasonable profit, a significant chunk of which they invest in research and development, and the rest they use so the employees can by their own overpriced luxury items?

Also, notice there’s no 4GB iPod Touch? Maybe the whole thing was a tech-timing clusterfuck, and bumping up to 8/16gb over the old 4/8gb was always scheduled for now, but the iPhone itself got delayed, or who knows what else? Mac rumor sites are now already abuzz about a 3G 16gb iPhone announcement for Europe within the next 2 months.

Giving back the $100 in credit to existing customers — AKA admitting that they fucked something up — is a pretty rare occurrance for Apple, who is usually extraordinarily unapologetic about its Business Practices (most of which would be prefaced by a capital “Evil” or at least “Big” if the company wasn’t so charming and attractive that the world can’t stop averting its eyes and accidentally dropping its binder all over the ground whenever Apple looked its way, and actually notice that they don’t really like us that much, they just like our money and attention). And, finally, if this was the damn Zune do you think $100 would be coming back the other way?

But really, it’s simpler than my tirades above make it sound. If they can afford to sell the thing for $200 cheaper now, then they could’ve afforded to do it in June. I don’t see the distinction between “they priced the phone as high as they could get away with” and “this was an intentional ploy to wring some extra bucks out of people.”

I do understand enough about economics to realize that you make more money if you sell more units, even if they’re priced lower. But this was a THIRD off the price. If they’d dropped it 50 bucks, you wouldn’t have heard anything from me except “Business as usual.” 100 bucks, I would’ve said, “Damn. Sucks to be me, but them’s the breaks.”

But I don’t see how anybody can see a $200 price reduction and not think that Apple seriously overpriced the initial release. (And the things are still in stock everywhere; it’s not like they suddenly created a huge demand.) Which means they charged the early adopters too much. Whether we were willing to pay it is irrelevant; like I said, you go into a business transaction assuming that the two sides are treating each other fairly.

I guess I’m just not yet cynical enough to believe that it’s good business practice to tell a million of your most loyal customers that you charged them $200 more than you needed to, and then go to USA Today and say “Tough titties.”

And I guess I’m just not petty enough to understand why people are going around shouting “whiners!!!!” If Apple’s selling the damn things for $400 now, what the hell do they care if everybody else gets theirs for $400 too?

At worst, Apple was being as arrogant as people always accuse the company of being, and gouging the people who keep coming back for their product. At best — at best — they seriously miscalculated demand for their new product and are desperately trying to make up for that. Either way, it was their error. And now people are going on about how “good” it was of them to offer non-money to people who already bought one? Apple has lost nothing in this whole situation — they’ll probably sell more phones, and they’ll get everybody else to spend even more money at their stores, since nothing Apple sells is less than $100. But somehow, I’m the bad guy for saying the whole thing sucks.

They knew that the product was great so they priced the phone as high as the felt like they could get away with. Given other products out there, including the iPods and particularly smartphones, the pricing was not that out of line. I can’t fault them for that. Personally I thought $600 was alot for the 8GB but that was about the upper limit for me so I think they guessed right. $500 would have been more sensible, but $700 would have been ridiculous. I don’t count cell-plan/contract discounts in my comparison.

The phone came out, and all the early adopters paid up for it, and for the most part people have been happy. I absolutely love mine and think it’s pretty much the coolest gadget I’ve ever had. And everyone seems to want one, but surprise, I don’t think they sold anywhere near as many as they were hoping to, irrespective of how great the device is. There are just too many uncertainties for a large number of people to pay that much for a new phone - so most people I knew who wanted one were just waiting.

I knew that something was up when less than 2 weeks after the phone came out, I checked the iPhone availability page at http://www.apple.com/retail/iphone/ and saw that there were phones available *everywhere* in the country. Every single store had them. The fact that they even had this page is evidence that they were expecting to be out of them.

So I think they overproduced in anticipation of demand that did not materialize. So they made the necessary adjustments and changed the price. They made a mistake in pricing and anticipating how much demand there would be in a new market for them. Big deal. The last thing they want is to go into the next quarter and find that they have a huge inventory of unsold iPhone’s on the shelves.

Bottom line - they have a product that has no competition whatsoever in my book and they could have just banked the $200. I wouldn’t have cared if they did. So I’m pretty happy to be getting the $100 back. Seems like a nice gesture to me.

I wish I could say after all that that I was happy with the new iPod line… I really was hoping for an 80GB iPod touch for my car.

First, are you the guy who hears about somebody getting mugged and then instantly says, “Yeah, well he shouldn’t have been walking in that part of town that time of night. It’s his own fault.”

Second, since you brought out the “massive whining” crack, I’m assuming you’re familiar with substance-free internet shit-slinging. So you know that “early adopter tax” is just an expression — you’re never ACTUALLY paying a premium JUST to get something in its first release. You’re buying something knowing that technology goes down in price and up in capability quickly because the hardware gets smaller, faster and cheaper to produce.

You buy a laptop now, knowing that in about 6-8 months, there’s going to be a newer, faster version that will most likely cost around 10-20% less. You’re not “wholly sabotaged,” you just don’t have the latest and greatest. And it NEVER happens in weeks unless you’re buying at the end of a product’s life cycle.

Do you expect me to believe that just over the past two months, the process of making these things got SO much more efficient that it costs $200 less to make each one? When in the history of consumer electronics, no other device has seen such a dramatic reduction in cost in its first YEAR? To me, THAT would be epic bullshit.

These aren’t brand-new improved models; these are the SAME phones, now 1/3 less. So if the cost of making them hasn’t gone down, then Apple could have been charging $200 less at the time of release. But they weren’t.

Third, whatever happened to good faith? Being TOTALLY WILLING to pay the asking price for the initial iPhone doesn’t mean being TOTALLY HAPPY about it. It just means that you’re assuming that the other end of the transaction isn’t trying to screw you — that it’s priced the way it is for a reason, because it’s the cheapest that they can go and still make a profit.

I acknowledged the thing was too damn expensive when I bought it, but implicit in that was the assumption that Apple had met me halfway and charged a reasonable amount. Again, how can Apple have successful initial releases if they keep telling their early adopters, “Hey,we’re screwing you because we can and we know you’ll keep coming back.”

Fourth, it’s not “nice” of Apple to give store credit. It’s an ass-covering move from the guy who just yesterday was telling his seed audience to “suck it up, crybabies.” You may be disgusted at the first-day purchasers of the iPhone complaining about the price drop. I’m disgusted at the people who are taking the half-assed store credit and saying “All is forgiven, Steve!” When stuff like that happens, it just confirms the most trite stereotype of Apple and its users.

Fifth, Steve Jobs is a douche.