Slashdot Mirror
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.
I work in the hardware business and I can tell you it is difficult enough to get enough inventory built for an ordinary product launch, but for what has been called the most successful CE launch _ever_... there is just no way they could have met demand without boosting the initial price significantly. And the problem with keeping the price high too long is that your momentum will dry up, and people won't even be paying attention any more by the time it does drop.
You can call it gouging if you want, but what if they'd instead just run out of stock immediately? Think "tickle me iPhone" - I don't think consumers would have been impressed by that.
Jobs did exactly the right thing. Price no lower than where you meet demand, and only once production has ramped up (which usually takes about two months - go figure) THEN price it at the sweet spot. Also consider seasonal factors which made it necessary to do this before the Xmas shopping season, which for the gadget industry begins right now.
I don't think that ANYONE, not one single person, who can afford a $600 phone and 2yr commitment to a $100+/mo plan, has a valid gripe about paying $200 extra up-front to be among the first to own it. If it was worth buying when you bought it, who cares what it sells for now? Were you hoping it would keep it's resale value or something?
but, ultimately, the people who bought it were willing to spend $600. Plus that $200 is insignificant in the long run, you are spending, what? $60 on that phone for 2 years? That 400 + 1440 = $1840 vs 2040. Not that big of a deal. Subtract the $100 giftcard (hey, if you don't want to buy anything with it, it makes a great birthday/christmas gift to someone who does).
I know, I hate when technology drops too, but the psychology of this is fascinating. It's similiar to gasoline - people watch the price like hawks and when its $.05 lower across town, they'll waste 20 minutes driving and another 1/4 gallon to reap "savings" that are not worth the cost in the end.
And people are getting so stressed out over this, you have to wonder if they are the same people who'd buy some new (american) car during the first 9 months only to get stressed out over the end-of-year price breaks into the thousands or the fact that that car is worth a few thousand less once they sign the papers?
Look at it this way: You got a nice product. As a bonus, out of the blue, you got a $100 gift certificate. Now that it's slightly cheaper, maybe you can get your spouse one, whatever.
He's still relevant because out of all the engineers who've ever done anything, Woz is very arguably in the top 10, period, of all time, end of story (which makes him one of the few, if any, who are still alive)
He's he first man who built modern computer hardware, then personally wrote the software that ran on top of it, all the while providing an extensible hardware and software system that other engineers could (and did, wildly) build upon. He literally built a huge chunk of this industry by himself, and another huge chunk was built on his shoulders.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Bad analogy. Sports require physical attributes that are well-known to deteriorate over time. Mental skills, unless degraded by disease or advanced age, do not.
The genius of Woz is that he used pen and paper to create something that had not been created by people who used actual hardware. He understood the fundamentals completely, but let his imagination run wild on a "what if".
How do you know he is still not doing that right now?
Must skill and artistry, in order to be recognized as valuable, serve the corporation?
Must Steve Wozniak, in order to be relevant in your world of Treasure, build another such financial behemoth as Apple?
Surely you must recognize that there are many people around the world who pursue their interests with dedication, skill, and imagination with little care of the financial gains to be derived.
Allow me to speculate. If Steve were independently wealthy, and no longer constrained to generate income to feed and shelter his family, would it not be a better use of his time to use his talents and breadth of experience to help his fellow man? Perhaps it is completely understandable that he should not relish the prospect of working at a soul-crushing cube farm. Perhaps it is acceptable for a man to stop trying to maximize shareholder investment when such a man has already done so amply, and rather dedicate himself to a different purpose.
Perhaps he has indeed changed what he does. But that does not make him less of a man.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Big deal. Early this year, I bought a 2007 Jeep Wrangler. If I bought the same vehicle today, it would be $3000 cheaper, because Jeep is now offering big sales incentives. And the warranty period was only three years when I bought it; now there's a lifetime power train warranty. (That has more to do with the breakup of Damlier-Chrysler and retaining customer confidence, though.)
What's really annoying iPhone suckers, I suspect, is that their overpriced status symbol just stopped being an overpriced status symbol. The CEO of Rolex once said "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." That applies here.
All excellent points and I agree with most of them. But I do disagree with your first one.
Mental ability changes over time. Be it flexibility, adaptability, etc there is a marked change as one gets older. Once you throw in a bit of trauma, emotional distress, etc there are many things that can happen "upstairs".
(Ever hear the old saw about most maths guys making their breakthroughs in their early days?)
And when I use the term relevance, I mean why does his doing something great years ago automatically qualify him as someone to listen to on everything that he chooses to ramble about? Or do we stop evaluating the source of information, because of emotional bias and hero worship?
I don't mean to come off ungrateful for what he did for the world back then, but how many free dinners does he get off it. If anyone else said what he gets quoted on, would it be special?
>>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.
Wait one second here! Are we talking about the same Apple Computer company because the one I know about routinely worked its engineering teams (all the way from the Apple ][gs, Lisa, Macintosh up through Newton) to the point of complete exhaustion and then at various times, during the "Black Friday" purges, suddenly ended people's careers. Frantic system development and high stress was the norm. To attempt to cast it as anything else is pure spin.
Maybe Jobs' Reality Distortion Field is finally affecting The Woz. Or maybe this mythical "time off" applies only to Apple Fellows and the most senior employees.
Both were lucky. They are complementary to each other, neither of them would have succeeded alone. Woz would've created a computer nobody wants to use, Jobs would've gone bankrupt trying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You know, back in the day (70s) gates published code in dr. dobbs documenting undocumented Z-80 instructions. Woz just made $2500 computers that those of us with s-100 systems found rather irrelevant. Gates built his own machine but had no interest in selling hardware, just software, which I kinda wish Apple had done.
Point is, back then Gates seemed like a fellow hacked and woz was just one of 100 guys that started a computer company and did all the hardware design.
I can't say I'm real impressed at having written machine code or done a (very non-statndard) disk controller. We all did that back then.
The first x86 on the net was an S-100 system running Gates Xenix in LA (gryphon.com). I don't think an Apple II ever talked to the network.
Obviously I'm not talking about now. Woz is cool, Bill is not. But that's not how it looked back then. The Apple II was regarded by people that already HAD a computer as a toy not worthy of much of anything and never understood what the fuss was all about. I think the reverance of Woz was strictly by people whose first computer was an Apple.
In a world without Apple there were still lots of choices and I have a greater revernce for say, Jay Miner than Woz. But if Apple hed nevr existed I'm not sure the landscape now would have changed much. Again, much as I hate to say it, MS drove the market and was responsible for the advent of cheap usable computers even your grandmother could use.
Let me be clear, I loathe gates and ms. But if you strip the emotion away gates has done more to get us where we are then woz ever did.
You may now mod me down to "-5, asshole". But you know I'm right. And don't worry it pains me as much to write this as it does you to read it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
He undeniably "was" a great engineer... Unlike Jobs, he gave up real work along time ago.... Besides, an engineer voicing his opinions on individual product prices is like a business person voicing his opinion on the design of the product. He has no damn idea what he is talking about, and is simply showing his ignorance by talking about it...
He's a clever geek, no doubt but he owes everything to the good fortune of meeting Steve Jobs. Without him Woz would still be a calculator engineer at HP. And frankly I find it difficult to take him seriously when he calls his biography "iWoz" when he had nothing to do with the Mac let alone any of the "i" products. Publicity hungry empty vessel. Who cares what he thinks: he has no particular insight.
Without Woz, jobs would be a sleazy new age religious leader. Without Jobs, Woz would be somewhere in the upper echelon of HP, wasting away his genius on crappy main frames and calculators. without them both meeting Personal computing would be very different. Billy and his gang would have no one to steal ideas from. IBM wouldn't have been panicking and signed their john handcock on a really dumb licensing deal with Billy. Ubiquitous computing may never have happened. And We may all be marveling at how the IBMs new Big Blue 1.0 gzh main frame is just a paltry $500,000, 600 lbs, and comes with 10 gigs of hard drive space because computing never hit it's stride with efficiencies of scale.
don't' over estimate Jobs. He's done well because he's foudn the right people to do the right things and has both vision and business accumen but he didn't do it all alone. dont' under estimate WOZ, a hardware/software genius is hard to find. He wrot ehte OS and designed the hardware. Few can do both.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."