Apple reduced the price on its 8GB iPhone by a third, or $200 yesterday, and believe it or not, people are actually protesting this.
(You really should click on the link and read some of the threads, it’s not often you get to see Macsters emotionally conspiring to screw Apple, on an Apple website, no less.)
Well, the next time I go to the supermarket, I’m going to check the circular, and God help them if they’re running a sale on anything I’ve recently bought. 🙂
Seriously, the protests seem to boil down to two themes:
1) “But they’ve never done this before so fast!!” OK, that’s true, but this is a company that once had a slogan “Think Different.” Well, they did, and I find more competitive pricing to try to make this the phone for the rest of us a good thought.
2) “They dissed us!” This argument boils down to “Apple charged its loyal fans top dollar, while the riff-raff is going to get it for a lot less.” In other words, “you devalued our eliteness too quickly.”
Well, gee, it’s not like you put an iPhone into your 401k plan. If you bought the thing, does it really matter if they cut the price two or six months later (there is a 14-day price protection plan for very recent buyers)?
And really, how elite is it, how memorable is it, to buy a $600 anything? Really, if you got the iPhone (or PS3, or Wii, or XBox, or whatever), do you put it on your resume? Will it be mentioned in your obituary, or carved into your tombstone?
The fact is long before the iPhone even came out, the word was out that the iPhone was a . . . uhh, high profit item, and early price cuts were predicted. The only real surprise is that Apple pulled the trigger.
Did Apple rip those people off? Well, if they did, they’ve been doing it for a long, long time, selling the notion to all-too-believing people that they could buy status for a few extra hundred or thousand of dollars.
The only difference is that this time, they popped some people’s bubbles.
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