Crazy Stevie's iPhone Prices are Insaaane!

theodp writes "Slate takes a look at the alarming lesson of the iPhone price cut and ponders the long-term effects of a Fire-Sale Nation mentality, especially when companies go all Crazy Eddie slashing prices on products like homes and cars that have active secondary markets. 'High-profile price-chopping tends to occur whenever companies freak out about the vicious combination of a slowing consumer economy and the prospect of getting stuck with big inventories of unsold goods. The tactic often works in the short term. The hype over insanely low prices functions as a form of free advertising, and the lower prices tend to attract buyers. Apple announced on Sept. 10 that it had sold its 1 millionth iPhone.'"

Comments

As long as the only connectivity is AT and T...

[fyngyrz]

It won't matter to me what his prices are. An incredibly short-sighted error, IMHO. I'm good for five of them (three kids and my SO.) But no connectivity, no buy.

Re:As long as the only connectivity is AT and T...

[blind biker]

Well, I used to work at Nokia (I guess you've heard of them) and specifically in phone testing. In short, your post is BS from beginning to end; Nokia would make sure their phone worked with every damn operator. Whether it will be then locked in in the USA it didn't matter, because we knew it wouldn't be locked in in Europe and half of the rest of the world. And we were painfully aware of the fact that in every single country of the world we were competing, almost toe to toe, with the likes of Motorola, Samsung and Ericsson (later SonyEricsson).

Yeah, testing takes time, but it's cost in time and money is nowhere so high that we'd simply NOT test and go exclusive with one (or $SMALLNUM) operator.

Whether AT&T was the logical choice or not, I don't know, but it certainly wasn't for the reasons you cite!

I can't believe the mods went for it, though?!