This is just great. Steve Jobs has written a letter apologizing for the quick price cut on the iPhone. Furthermore, they’re giving all iPhone customers a $100 rebate towards a future purchase.
I love this decision. The $100 premium I paid to get the iPhone when I did seems fine. Apple lowers prices and sells more phones, and I now have an unexpected $100 to go spend on more Apple products.
So Apple simplified the product line yesterday by discontinuing the 4GB model; now there’s only the 8GB model. They also dropped the price $200 (33%) to $400.
So was this a mistake on their part? Did they price the product too high at first? Hubris on Infinite Loop?
Or, perhaps, did they have a clever plan all along. Maybe they realized that a certain group of people would buy the first ~ 500,000 units at just about any price. Apple loyalists, gadget freaks, and startup entrepreneurs who didn’t quite realize they didn’t have an income anymore (ahem) were all going to buy the device as soon as it came out. It was the cool thing, the bleeding edge. Only after this group has satisfied its craving for new gadgets would Apple simplify the product line and reduce prices.
I’m not sure. I personally think it was all planned out to happen like this. Obviously they knew they’d be releasing the new video iPod Nanos and the iPod Touch devices, and maybe it made sense all along to tweak the iPhone line at the same time. Then again maybe it was just their turn to make a mistake.
At Bravadosoft we like the iPhone. I’d like to get our software running on it. I really believe it’s a superb platform for web apps. Our problem though is that we use Flash in our application, and the iPhone doesn’t support it yet. A chart like this one doesn’t render right now, and that’s a shame.
We have a sharp looking application and we’re Apple fans. My guess is that we’ll figure a way around this, even if means having a separate iPhone-compatible version of our application. I think Apple wants us to use QuickTime but I don’t see that happening.
Final note–I like the concept of simplifying a product line and having pricing that makes sense. At Bravadosoft we’ll keep our configurations and pricing as simple as possible. Traditionally in the Business Intelligence market (and really the enterprise software market as a whole) the pricing schemes are byzantine in their complexity. Vendors have had a goal of selling as many components of a large suite as possible, and playing around with the pricing models to make it all look right. We’re not going to do that.