I voted "Good" because it's good to expand the market, but It's bad in the sense that customers new to Apple, and rabid Apple loyalists are pissed and vocal about it, and outrageous that the ******* stock is taking another dive after a 7 point run-up the day before! Someone is manipulating the stock and it ain't me!
Voted "good". I don't understand why anyone would vote otherwise. If someone has a beef with Apple dropping price so soon, their beef is really with the initial price, not the cut. The cut doesn't take anything away from them.
And obviously if someone bought it at the higher price, it appeared to deliver enough value to do so.
I think the original pricing, and the massive cut so soon without any real competition on the scene, point to a strategy where Apple intended to sell it at $400 all along, and only flashed the $600 price to make $400 look like an amazing bargain. The first adopters are casualties of sorts in this strategy. If it was just about extracting an extra $200 off them, Apple wouldn't have done it. It wasn't a large enough gain for the bad press.
And remember what the total package of the phone and contract is. This is not huge drop in price.
A drop in price is a good thing for everyone. For starters, new adopters will get the product for cheaper, and thus there will be more of them (more can afford it). Secondly, this means that Apple is producing in volume, and has worked out a lot of bugs in the production process. A drop in price stimulates the market, moving the industry forward and yielding more innovative products.
In a year, it won't matter that the day-one adopters paid $200 more than they maybe should have. Who will care in that much time? The iPhone will probably be different then... 3G, VOIP, higher capacity, who knows? Maybe even different sizes. My point is, technology depreciates in value at a very fast rate, especially when the industry moves forward so quickly. What really matters is that early adopters got all of that attention they wanted from having an iPhone... they would have been sensible people and waited to get one if they didn't care about that (and only that) in the first place.
Comments
And obviously if someone bought it at the higher price, it appeared to deliver enough value to do so.
I think the original pricing, and the massive cut so soon without any real competition on the scene, point to a strategy where Apple intended to sell it at $400 all along, and only flashed the $600 price to make $400 look like an amazing bargain. The first adopters are casualties of sorts in this strategy. If it was just about extracting an extra $200 off them, Apple wouldn't have done it. It wasn't a large enough gain for the bad press.
And remember what the total package of the phone and contract is. This is not huge drop in price.
In a year, it won't matter that the day-one adopters paid $200 more than they maybe should have. Who will care in that much time? The iPhone will probably be different then... 3G, VOIP, higher capacity, who knows? Maybe even different sizes. My point is, technology depreciates in value at a very fast rate, especially when the industry moves forward so quickly. What really matters is that early adopters got all of that attention they wanted from having an iPhone... they would have been sensible people and waited to get one if they didn't care about that (and only that) in the first place.