If I am hearing the news correctly, Apple (among other cool things) just lowered the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399. Which means when I get the next big check in for my Orlando trip, I’m going straight to the Apple Store and buying one.
Update: Ok, so let’s analyze the backlash here a little bit. Jobs writes a letter and says, in effect, Whoops. Sorry I pissed you off, fanboys early adopters, so here’s what we’re going to do: I’ll give you each $100 back in credit at the Apple Store, and I hope that makes you feel a little better.
Gadget-blogs, whose sole purpose on God’s green earth is to salivate over grainy camera-phone pictures of techie shit only available in Japan, are heaping on the abuse, crying foul over this development. “$100 doesn’t go a long way in Apple land… Either way, the money’s going back to Apple.”
Well, guess what, asshats? You stood on line to buy the phone. You had to be the guy with the shiniest toy on the block, the guy who just threw your last latest-and-greatest wonderphone in a shoebox in the closet with the scores of other phones you’ve had since you got a cell plan. Now you’re upset ’cause they dropped the price? Did you scream and cry this loud when your Xbox went on sale or the price on your RAZR dropped $300? Nobody made you buy the iPhone when it was $600—you did that yourself.
I happened to read a fantastic essay buy a guy who was an editor at Gizmodo, then left, then came back, wrote said essay, and got fired for it. (Now he’s the gadget editor at Boingboing.) In essence, it says something like this: knock it off. Quit spending your time, money and energy buying every brand-new techie piece of hardware out there to fill the empty void in your lives.
It’s pretty sobering reading, because I lust after the unobtainable shiny gadgets as much as the next guy. I want a 42″ LCD TV, a TiVo, a PDA, a tablet PC, a robot that does my laundry, my own unmanned surveillance plane, and a supercomputer whirring quietly in my basement.
But I don’t have any of that stuff. I have a 15-year-old TV and a three-year old Motorola phone that I can’t wait to throw in a lake. I am a fan of Apple, I believe in their products, and I try to be an evangelist without being an annoying fanboy. I’m going to buy an iPhone in a month or two, not because I need to show it off, but because my current phone sucks, I already have an AT&T plan, I use a Mac daily, and I think it would help me do business. If I’d gone out and dropped $600 for the iPhone two months ago, and then found out they were giving me $100 back in credit, I think I’d have to be pretty happy—show me another company who’s publicly admitted a mistake and taken immediate action like that in the last year.