In typical Apple fashion, Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer sat down and told an RBC Capital market analyst that the only way they would released a cheap iPhone would be if they could dominate the market and provide a “category-killer” experience.
Think what the original iPhone did to the Blackberry market — same deal.
The philosophy may run contrary to the never-ending rumors we’ve been hearing about a cheaper iPhone, an iPhone 4S, a cheaper iPhone 4, or any other product rumoured to be sent into the “cheap” phone market just to blow it all up, but it’s not exactly the Apple way, is it?
Apple’s long offered cheaper iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, is still around and available on Apple’s website. Carriers will offer it up at discounts and sometimes even give it away for free with a contract. If anything, the cheap iPhone we keep hearing about already exists, but it’s just called last-generation as opposed to cheap alternative.
What the rumor-mongers really want is a newly designed, new form-factor phone, with a cheap price, not a cheaply priced iPhone, so we should be pretty up front about that.
When we think about it in those terms, Tim Cook’s comments to RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky make a lot more sense. Apple will likely continue to provide cheap alternatives in the form of discounted last-generation iPhones, but a brand new, never seen before, candy bar phone killer would have to be pretty special if Apple was going to release it to the wild.
Apple doesn’t do things just for the sake of doing them. They do things that they think will obliterate the status quo. Until they think they have a product like that, they won’t release crap because people are calling for it.
Source: RBC Capital Markets
Via: AppleInsider