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What is this?

It's more agreed than some of the laws that premium has to be paid to be one of the first to have something. It's even more true to those early adopters since they elected to do so. But now every company must apologize publicly for price cuts of their new products by offering an extended price protection plan?

Kudos to Steve Jobs for his compassionate act but it makes absolutely no sense.

Cry more and maybe they can get a full refund! :lol:

What does QFT mean? I tried to figure it out, but I couldn't =(

It doesn't matter as the money that those customers paid stays in Apple. It isn't walking out the door in the form of cash that can be spent elsewhere. They will have to use the Gift Cards in an Apple Store or the Online Store. This means two things:

1. The early adopters aren't really getting their money back. They have to go respend it at Apple otherwise it's useless.
2. This makes it really easy for Apple accounting-wise.

I hate to overly simplify this but isn't this kinda saying we did over charge you in a way?

Yeah but an admission of guilt with partial compensation in business is usually met with understanding since everyone knows that businesses are out to screw you. It's a nice gesture and a great PR move but a ****ty solution. For one they're only doing a partial reimbursement and it's to their own company.

Even tho $100 has to be used at Apple, it's better than nothing and a nice thing I would say he is doing.
Good for him.

why did they drop $200 on the iphone anyways.. something just not right here
why wud they do that when people were still buying it at $500 - $600

The people who bought it for $599 were completely willing to pay that much for it at the time. IMO, Steve Jobs is being generous w/ a $100 voucher, even though it can only be used at the Apple store where most items cost a lot more than $100.

At the same time, this is a lesson to all of us: Don't buy brand new apple products because they will probably be dropping in price quickly. Now that the message is clear from Apple that they either don't appreciate early adopters or don't know how to price a product competitively in the market so stay clear from new Apple products. Nice one Apple...

i cant belive someone could be upset at a friggin price cut. i heard this same sort of crap when the rumors of a HDMI equiped XBOX360 where running around. people where all up in arms that THEIR model didnt have HDMI and somehow felt as though MS owed them some kind of discount or trade up program. thats rediclious.

even if Apple started selling 8gb iphones for $99.99 anyone who has already purchased one deserves NOTHING. its not as though its a scam. its business for crying out loud. Apple (or Jobs in particular, i don't know) are marketing wiz's. they KNOW they have this borderline cult following (as small as it may be) who will buy the new ipods and other apple gadgets when they come out. They know a lot of them have disposable income or are so inclined to pay good money, and like any smart business man you capatilse on peoples wants. no one was forced into buying an iphone, hell the iphone provided no new features to the market space.

it would be diferent if a city raised the price of public transportation by 1/3 for a weekend where there would be higher then normal traffic. and then reduce the rate afterwards just to make an extra buck, because people REALY on that PUBLIC service. but you buying a friggin phone then getting your panty's in a twist because you can get one cheaper a month later is so beyond ridiculous that i feel the only way this story could come to a head is if someone filed a class action law suit. and given the level of jackassery in this country im sure someone is already going through the motions.

That's awesome. I don't see what is wrong with $100 Apple money. You bought an iPhone, which is clearly capable of playing music, so spend that money on iTunes Music Store and get yourself a bucket load of music or movies! I mean, good Lord!

People will find anything to complain about.

In other news, Apple overcharges so much for their products that they can afford to mail out $100 to all iPhone owners who paid the full $599 for the device. A Microsoft representative was quoted as saying that they have no plans to rebate Vista owners.

Technology moves fast and is indeed a bumpy road, but this is a clear indication that Apple charged way more on the iPhone than was necessary, which I would say is the case for their other products as well. Barely over two months and it already sees a $200 price cut? Technology doesn't move that fast Steve. They sold millions, did they not? It's not like Wii where there are continued shortages.

ha, I never understood anyone willing to pay 600$ for a simple smartphone. 600$ is the normal price for an advanced PDA phone with even more features than someday a third generation iPhone will offer. Even 400$ is still too expensive for a smartphone which the iPhone clearly is.

It's obvious that Apple planned to make initially big cash using all those fools who wanted to be the first with a iPhone, only to be more hip than others. Even their "generous" 100$ offer only tricks people into buying more overpriced Apple stuff... eventhough most probably less than 30% of the initial iPhone buyers will reclaim this gift card.

It's always a win-win situation for Apple if you have people which can be as easily fooled as most Apple-fans.

I believe it's somewhere in between the two extremes:

1- the 4gb wasn't selling well and was better chopped out to give room for a 100% 8GB production
2- Competition was rolling in, in the "me too! I do touchscreens and sleek interfaces!" (Nokia's viral vid for example) and are far (or seem to be) more efficient than the "This is the iPod killer" competition Apple's seeing on the dap market.

However, there's also the aspect that they had to rebalance the price-feature between the once-unique iPhone and the iPhone-minus-phone iPTouch. After all, you can't have 399$ 16GB iPTouch sitting next to a 599$ 8GB iPhone. Even marketing can't excuse such a gap.

from a business standpoint, i think the $100 rebate is simply marvelous. first of all, for the whiners, if you paid $600 towards an apple product, you now get $100 to pay for some other apple product.

$100 allows the people to purchase some other product where the money ultimately goes back to apple's pockets. most likely it will not be a shuffle purchase as people would rather use the credit to help pay for something fancier. maybe i'm wrong but i read somewhere that iTV and iphone are the only products with the least profit margin, and iTV isn't the main selling point of apple, so basically they'd making more money hand over fist with this ordeal.

i'm an apple stock option holder, and in the last two days lost about $40,000, but i'm really looking forward to their current quarters' earnings report.

You seem to be ignoring the precedent - next time apple do something like this - people are going to expect money back.

I.e new MacBook comes out and the price drops - people will expect a rebate in retrospect, or make themselves look petty and inconsistent.

This will hurt them in the long run methinks.

can anything else go wrong with these pieces of crap, not that this is a hardware failure of any sort it is definatley a markting failure

i remember years ago a mate of mine bought a nintendo game cube, (yes he was the only person i know that ever bougt one) but they dropped like half price within a couple of months, he rang nintendo and did some complaingin and got a $300 cheque. so it is not just apple that does this, other compaies have done it in the past, even if it was only when they were asked to

I highly doubt steve jobs felt bad for the people that paid so much and suddenly decided to do this. This was probably planned before apple even announced the iphone. One thing I have to give credit to apple for is marketing, they probably have the best marketing strageties of almost any company.

Make as much as you can when the hype is there, when the hype dies down bring your sales back up by lowering the price. Normal marketing stratagy but to come up with the idea to make the first people feel better about Apple by giving them 100 dollars to spend at a store is a great idea.

One thing I noticed about apple lately is that they are trying too hard to get people to love them, as in they are trying to get people to think they are not doing this for money and that they want to save the consumer money. I think sooner or later this stratagy will backfire and hurt them, but maybe steve jobs is just insecure.