Friday, September 7, 2007

Don't drop the iPhone price – just unlock the damned thing!

Apple just dropped the price of the iPhone from $599 to $399. I can't help thinking that maybe – just maybe – the drop was required because it wasn't hitting its sales targets.

If this is true, surely the best way to increase sales is to provide the iPhone unlocked? If you add up the potential increase in US sales with newly created International sales you're probably talking about a 3-4x sales increase. At least. And that's at 600$ a unit! And Steve Jobs wouldn't even have to deal with pissed off early adopters by handing out $100 vouchers.

I wish Apple would take the long-term view on this and look beyond the short-term kickbacks from the telcos.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

uh huh...so ur pretty much saying Apple should breach the contract that they negotiated with AT&T, sell a lot more units, and then most likely give a large sum of that money right back to aT&T when they lose their court case. Smart....

Anonymous Coward said...

If it went to court and if Apple lost (surely they built in some favorable breach of contract terms?) then maybe in the short-term it would not be financially interesting ti unlock the iPhone.

Long term however I think Apple and its customers will do much better being independent from the tecos.

Anonymous said...

your right!

Anonymous said...

This post is just outright stupid, so I can't believe I'm replying. I deal with Apple in two different regions and I am also a mobile phone distributor. Apple has international offices all around the world. They are not short-enough to say "let's just sell it in the US, durrr". Steve Jobs and the top execs are likely smarter than us, hence their million dollar compensation packages. Apple is rolling out internationally through its regional offices, but in a planned fashion. To think that US Apple would destroy its own overseas markets by launching an unlocked US version is just so stupid I am not even going to type anymore.