Today Apple demonstrated its love for the early adopters and hard-core Apple fanatics who’ve supported the company by announcing a 200-dollar price drop on the iPhone.
The best part, if you’re the type who reads the internets, is that it opened the door for all those who didn’t already buy an iPhone (you know, poor people) to jump on the various message boards and comment threads and shout “Suckers!!!!” So as if it weren’t enough to have Apple giving us the metaphorical kick in the nads, we’ve got the typical internet yabbos coming along and kicking sand in our faces.
It is to those fine yabbos that I offer the following retorts:
You know electronics are going to quickly drop in price.
Of course. Apple in particular is known for releasing new iterations and dropping the price on the new versions. But one third of the price after only two months is extreme. That’s not expanding the installed user base, that’s just saying “Screw you, suckers! Ha ha!” to the people who respect your company enough to give you money for version 1.0 of your product.
If it was worth that much money to you when you bought it, a price drop shouldn’t change that.
And if people could just be nice to each other, then there wouldn’t be war. Sure, I was willing to pay an obscene amount of money for a damn cell phone two months ago; that doesn’t mean I was happy about it. When are the doctors going to stop going on about videogame addiction and start looking into a cure for compulsive consumerism?
You paid $200 for bragging rights.
Who was bragging? Were people really going around saying, “Ha ha I just paid too much money for a cell phone! Suck on that!”
So my warning/advice still stands: if you want the phone but haven’t gotten one yet, wait for the next iteration. Sure, they’re cheaper now, but the cost was only one of the problems with the thing. It’s still buggy as hell, it doesn’t have enough software (although the third-party stuff is surprisingly sophisticated and easy to install, another “screw you, consumer!” from Apple), it doesn’t have enough storage, and will undoubtedly have improved features like GPS and the like in a future version.
If you just wanted the fancy iPod and portable web browser, I don’t know what to say about that; I needed a phone and didn’t want to carry around two devices.
A lot of Apple’s promotional stuff about the iPhone mentions all the ways you can communicate using only one finger. Which, of course, is appropriate, since what I have to say to Apple only requires one finger.
P.S.: Another one of the awesome announcements Apple made today is that they’ll be offering ringtones on the iTunes store for the low low price of two bucks each! That’s right, you get to pay them 99 cents for the privilege of copying a file from one folder to another! Go screw yourself, Apple!