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Apple Legend Woz Blasts iPhone Price Drop
Stony Stevenson writes "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak Saturday blasted Steve Jobs' decision to drop the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after the product was launched. Said Woz: 'Everyone expects technology to drop in price. The first adopters always pay a premium. I am one of them. I am used to that. But that one was too soon, too harsh ... A lot of people from Apple, even a lot of people that worked on the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers in the beginning now work at Google. The thinking over at Google is very much like early Apple days. The fact that they give people time off to work on their own ideas is exactly matches some of the things that made Apple great. I wish Apple did that.'" We just discussed the price drop last night.
A full transcript of the interview can be read here: Interview: Wozniak slams Apple for iPhone price drop snafu
Go read Founders at Work (link to Amazon, no ref to me) and read the chapter on Apple. He's a f'ing genius.
"Piter, too, is dead."
I didn't buy one and I thought it was a kick in the gut. Just about everyone knows that CE devices drop in price over time, but the duration and percentage of the price drop is a bit steep. If they are pricing it for exclusivity, then dropping the price is a bad idea. Still, I wouldn't be buying it to show off, I try not to flaunt any of my consumer electronics stuff.
I wanted one but just couldn't justify it. I'm glad I didn't and it doubly puts me off buying a launch product, I can wait a product generation if I have to, I renewed my contract elsewhere because I also wanted the product to mature before buying into it. It's not a good idea to buy a first revision product anyway. The adage has been well known in the Apple world, though it should apply to any brand product, wait a while to make sure there aren't any systematic flaws.
BTW: the basic 2yr commitment was for a $60/mo plan. It's not well known, but it can be used without a contract, just that the per-minute costs are higher.
Let me put this into perspective:
Woz designed the Apple ][ from scratch, invented the A][ hard drive controller, wrote the system monitor in machine code (without the aid of an assember, mind you!) as well as the Integer Basic interpreter and did this at least twice (he lost the source code) and it was several bytes smaller the second time, etc. etc. etc.
Gates, Davidoff and Allen as a team gave us a hacked version of someone else's basic interpreter. Gates gave us donkey.bas
I rest my case.
I think this is a variation of Block Pricing which is supposed to be illegal in the US most of the time. But for someone in the Business and not Geek community, it's a nice thing to be able to do. The idea is to adjust the prices offered based on the individual's demand for the product. Overly simplified examples would be to charge more for food in expensive suburbs than others, raising prices for people who come to your store in newer more expensive cars, increasing the cost of cable TV during the football season.
This isn't really block pricing since, as mentioned, it's more a management technique of supply/demand curve. I think this was a good idea. But I wonder if this was a price cut that was driven by other factors than just the Economics 101 Supply/Demand curve.
Here we go again with the Woz-n-Steve show with all the mythology about how they revolutionised computers.
Err no , they didn't. At least not from a technological point of view. Xerox PARC did.
Check out this link if you don't believe me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
That was 1973 , long before Woz had even thought up the prehistoric command line drive Apple I.
Sorry , how great was Woz again?
I believe that without Apple, our user interfaces would look substantially different. I mean, try this: Get the latest Ubuntu Live CD and boot it. Now compare this to the UI of the Apple Lisa. Not a whole lot of differences! You got your overlapping windows that you move by dragging the title and resize by dragging the bottom right corner, your dropdown text menus with keyboard shortcuts, your trash can, your icons for files and applications with names below them... Apple actually came up with, or made popular, a great number of the UI abstrations we take for granted nowadays...
Microsoft actually went into a quite different direction with Windows 3.x, but "came back" to the Lisa/Macintosh way with Windows 95. Nowadays, most computers work like Lisas... So, in a way, it was neither Woz nor Gates who actually influenced computers. It was Jobs, who was part of (or leading) both the Lisa and the Mac team at Apple.
Didn't Apple give everyone working for the company a free iPhone at launch?