StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:If people were willing to keep buying at $600 in comparable numbers and your R&D bill is cleared, why give up $200 of pure profit?

Because more people are willing to pay $200 less. Also, don't forget that there are discounts to be had now that there is an iPod touch shipping, which uses the same parts basically. So that means volume discounts, which Apple's iPod supply chain is infamous for. Also, since the 4 GB model is no longer being sold, that cuts down prices on the assembly line, packaging, etc ... One iPhone, one price.

Granted, the savings there probably don't come anywhere close to the $200 of (presumably) pure profit that Apple is losing per unit, but they might've been substantial enough to make it an easier pill to swallow in the name of more marketshare.

Remember the last time Steve Jobs made a big promise on stage? It had something to do with IBM and 3 GHz PowerPC 970s. And IBM made him look like a chump. Now he's made another big promise on-stage: 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008. I'm guessing he doesn't want to break another promise, so with the holiday season coming up, the continuing consumer interest in the iPhone and the first sales milestone being met earlier this week, he wants to aim for the bleachers. Hell, with the iPhone hacking yielding both working third-party applications and a full software unlock, the iPhone is enjoying a resurgence of press coverage. There's no better time for a price cut.

I know why they did it. I was explaining why paying off the R&D bill doesn't explain the price drop. As in, "why give up $200 profit just because you've paid off R&D"?

I still don't understand why Apple is afraid to release an API. Just make it so that third party applications have to be run from a special "Applications" button so they take no precedence over Apple's apps...

I've already seen some pretty cool homebrew. The whole web apps idea was nice, but the iPod Touch doesn't have the iPhone's ability to always be online, and the fact that using EDGE makes phone calls go to voicemail would make me want to minimize my app usage for Web 2.0 apps.

There is, in fact, already a plethora of open source applications that transcend the concept of "homebrew" in terms of quality...OpenSSH, Apache, a stable open source package management system (Install.app IIRC), and several embryonic open source apps such as IRC clients, AIM clients and so forth.

I wouldn't be at all suprised if Apple opened up development in the future, but did so in a manner that locked devs out from a lot of internals that the current third party apps are currently taking advantage of. Apple wants to sell applications over iTunes, I suspect, so basically if its a bit of revenue they can take a piece of, that will work for them, but that leaves the open source community out in the cold.