So Steve Jobs announced today at San Francisco’s Moscone Center the great new line of iPods and iPhones. They talked about all the great additions and innovations they have made. To top the whole thing off, right near the end (in an attempt to save the worst for last I’m sure), Steve Jobs announced that since everyone loves iPhone they want to make it more affordable! That’s right, now the 8GB iPhone will only be $399, and they are going to phase the 4GB iPhone out (and you can get it for the amazing low price of $299.00 if you can find it).
That’s right folks, if you were an early adopter of the iPhone and you bought a 4GB iPhone you already have discontinued product. If you bought the 8GB iPhone then you now just paid pretty close to a $100/month fee for having the latest and greatest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product drop so drastically in such a short period of time, and with the iPhone that amount of time was just a little over 60 days (68 days to be exact). That’s paying a $2.94 a day penalty for buying the iPhone early. I hope those of you that are single were able to parlay having the phone into some sweet, sweet lovin’.
Now I’m not naive and I’m not stupid. I know that electronics do go down in price over time. I also know that as an early adopter you pay a higher price in order to have the latest and greatest (I don’t even want to tell you what the price we paid for our first DVD player, which has less functions then a $30.00 player you can get at Wal-Mart today). Usually time helps to take the sting off of the early adoption bite. You don’t mind paying $200 more then anyone else, because even at a year that would be only about $0.54 a day to have the coolest of the cool technology. Let’s face it, half a buck a day is a lot different then nearly 3 bucks a day.
Still, I do enjoy my iPhone. I’m glad that I can carry my music and my phone and it is just one device. If you look at the advances in the iPod itself I think we can all agree as well that in a year, maybe two, these very iPhone’s themselves will be obsolete compared to the future iPhones. So do we really have a lot to be angry about here?
I’m not really all that mad now that the dust has settled. I had sold a BlackBerry and an iPod in order to reduce the costs of my iPhone (in the end I only paid about $200 for the iPhone). Sure, if I had waited 68 days I would have been able to just use my sale proceeds to pay for the whole phone, and I’d be $200 bucks richer. I wouldn’t have enjoyed all of the attention that my iPhone brought me over the past two months though. With friends and family I was the center of attention for at least 10 minutes, which is very nice for an attention whore such as myself.
I think in the whole affair the people that should be the most pissed off are the ones that queued for more then just a few hours to get the iPhone on the day it was released. Supply was strong and there was no real need to camp for the phone.
I guess in retrospect we now know that we are suckers who fell for the hype, one way or another. Such is life.
-WW
