Apple iPhone price cut surprising but brilliant

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 09 September 2007 17:00

Your IT - Mobility

But it does look like we were as surprised as Steve Jobs was with our surprise that $200 could be slashed off the price without him expecting anyone to have blinked. And so, with the offer of a $100 voucher, which as has been pointed out has to be spent with Apple so it benefits them anyway, Jobs has gone some way to mollifying iPhone owners who didn’t qualify for the $200 rebate.

Apple owners are a loyal bunch, after all, and there’s always something Apple or Apple-related to buy if you want, and no iPhone owner will have any trouble spending the $100 voucher.

Dropping the iPhone price does lead to questions over whether it was priced too high to begin with, but now that the price has indeed been dropped, and quite nicely at that, any price barrier that existed before to iPhone (and now iPod touch) ownership has been seriously lowered, giving many more people the opportunity to buy one, and vastly increasing the iPhone and iPod touch userbase.

That’s good for all iPod/iPhone owners, for it will spur new software development for the platform by Apple, existing third party developers, and hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, a much freer third party software development environment. If the people want it, hopefully Steve Jobs will give it to us, even if he doesn’t think we should have it, or at least, not yet, as the platform settles down and bugs are ironed out without needing to fight off rogue apps or other Internet nasties.

That’s not all Apple has to worry about. Of course, there was the threat of legal action from Cisco over the use of the iPhone name, since settled, and now HTC is reported to be thinking of suing over the use of the name iPod touch, when HTC had already launched the HTC Touch first.

But it’s the price cut that’s betting all the headlines. It was a brilliant move, and Steve Jobs response to the shock of doing the unprecedented in dropping a product’s price so quickly was swift and just. Let’s hope he’s also hearing us all on how we’d like to see the iPhone improved, enhanced and expanded, and through the magic of the software platform, is able to bring the iPhone/iPod touch 2.0 software out sooner rather than later, introducing some of the features we’d like to see in whatever updates come in the interim.

Until that future arrives, the present is looking very cool, with what truly are the best iPods yet – and the iPhone to boot on top of all that. Apple’s handheld hardware lineup has never been bigger or better, and the competition now know what’s going to hit them this Christmas – not just an entire new range that beats but with a much cheaper iPhone to boot.

How competitors respond will be very interesting to see, not only by Christmas but throughout 2008 and beyond. Nokia’s N series is rapidly evolving, Sony Ericsson’s models continue their convergent multimedia advance, both Samsung and LG offer innovative models and even Motorola is mulling a multi-touch future, no doubt to feature soon on Windows Mobile models too, with music, video, photos, cameras, storage, high speed connectivity, design, ease of use and more all crucial elements to success.

Prepare for smartphones that have at least as much, if not more power than the computer you’re reading this article on today. It’s here now with the iPhone, to some degree, but over the next couple of years will become much more commonplace.

Your smartphone will never be the same again, and will be more powerful computer in your pocket than ever before. So, with all this power comes great responsibility – use it wisely – and may the force – and your iPhone (or cool clone) – be with you.