Heh! It has to be said, I always thought that quote I mentioned was from TomTom. Thing is, if they can flog the
software for, say, £50 or so, that's got to be a better profit than a device for two or three times that.
Elsewhere, interesting news continues to filter in. First, in the US at least, iPhones now HAVE to be activated in-store. While this won't stop unlocking, it's going to put the brakes on some. Personally, I don't have a problem with this. The iPhone's even going to be available on PAYG, and while O2 isn't ideal for everyone, this really wouldn't be a great time for Apple to suddenly lose a huge wodge of cash, due to 1 in 6 iPhone users continuing to unlock the phone. (I'm thinking about this both from a knee-jerk idiocy scale—see all the analysts who are already saying Apple's totally screwed outside the US, because it "only" has a 5% share of the smartphone market—and from an R&D standpoint, with Apple being one of the few companies that pumps a shit-load of money back into research.)
Quote:
On the other hand, perhaps Apple are smarter than that and it may only ever have been a short-term measure, designed to milk the early adopter market, at which it did very well.
Perhaps it was a no-risk strategy. Apple doesn't always get it right, and Jobs has already been bitten by a couple of horrendously expensive failures (Cube, anyone?) Had iPhone not sold well, Apple would have still made a good profit, meaning the exercise wouldn't have been a write-off. As it is, I think it's fair to say iPhone has outperformed expectations, and with that in mind, Apple has moved to a more typical model. As of July, of course, Apple might end up making money hand-over-fist through the store—remember that it gets 30% of the revenue for
every software purchase.
Just about the only negative news, bar the crappy camera that still exists in iPhone (again, that seems a cost issue—Apple appears to have spent its time honing the old model rather than massively upgrading the entire thing; see also: Snow Leopard) was seeing O2's £30 plan. It's clearly only there to bump people back to the £35 one. Quite where O2 can justify the drop from 600 to 75 minutes and 500 to 125 texts, I don't know. Then again, it'll be interesting to see what VOIP stuff yomps on in for iPhone, and now Apple's not revenue-sharing, I'll bet the company will now be quite happy to see Skype on its phone.