I didn’t really do much looking into the details of the $100 Apple was giving back to iPhone early adopters back when I tacked the note onto my post about the iPhone, but I did want to chime in on this a bit.
First of all, you have to give Steve Jobs credit for turning around on this whole thing so quickly. In his USA Today interview, Jobs took a pretty unapologetic stance on the iPhone price cut, but did turn around and act contrite about it fairly quickly. That includes an open letter to the iPhone early adopter community posted on the Apple website. That’s great, and as expected, a good deal of the Apple community is now mollified that Jobs is the grand and benevolent master of all things technology, but let’s look at this objectively.
Sure, Jobs is giving back early adopters $100, but there’s two things to remember in it. First of all, it’s not even enough to bridge the gap to cover what people who waited a couple of months are now paying for the phone. That’s to be expected, I suppose, given things, and something is better than nothing. Still, people who bought the iPhone in the past like two weeks can still get price matched on it and get their $200 back.
The second, and far more important, thing is that the $100 Jobs is handing out? It’s coming in the form of store credit. Wow, that’s being generous, Steve! Way to go there! So basically, Jobs is taking the obvious dissatisfaction of his early adopters and working to turn it around into more Apple sales. This is thinking different? If I was one of those idiots that waited on line for hours for an iPhone (and, that’s what I think of those people, honestly), I think I’d feel more stabbed in the back that the company was trying to make even more sales off of mollifying me. Luckily for Jobs and Apple of course, this gesture restored the reality distortion field to 100% operating efficiency, so there’s nothing to worry about, and that might be the saddest fact of all.
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