Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone

Market Watch ^ | 7:18 PM ET Mar 28, 2007 | John Dvorak

[The_Victor]

Commentary: Company risks its reputation in competitive business

BERKELEY (MarketWatch) -- The hype over the unreleased iPhone has actually increased over the past month despite the fact that nobody has seen or used the device. This, if nothing else, proves the power of branding and especially the power of brand loyalty.

It's the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market. And it's exactly the crowded-market aspect of this that analysts seem to be ignoring.

Apple Inc.'s past successes have been in markets that were emerging or moribund. Its biggest hit has been the iPod. But let's examine what happened here.

First the MP3 player business was segmented and unfocused with numerous players making a lot of cheap junk and not doing much to market any of it.

Apple does what? Advertise. Gosh, what a concept.

Then there was the online music distribution business, again unfocused and out-of-control with little marketing and a lot of incompatible technologies. So Apple comes in with a reasonable solution, links it to the heavily promoted iPod and bingo. A winner.

It advertises on TV, on billboards and on the Internet. Within no time the company takes over the business that would probably still be languishing without Apple.

Thus Apple does what it does best. It produces a jazzy product and promotes it like any good business should do. And in the process manages to get a high margin.

This is nothing more than the fundamentals.

[jude24]

If they're not making one heck of a margin on that, they're doing something wrong.

Part of the pricepoint is that Apple doesn't want the iPhone to cannibalize iPod sales. Their previous foray into an iTunes compatible cellphone, the abortive Motorola ROKR, was designed to hold no more than 100 songs. This is why the cell phone, which is essentially a 4GB - 8 GB iPod, must reflect the cost of 4-8 GB iPod contained within a cell phone.

Or so Apple's reasoning goes.

[null and void]

LOL!

[discostu]

You should re-read this thread and some of the others since iPhone got announced. There's a handful of people with blind confidence that the iPhone, a product no one outside Apple has even touched, will rule the cellphone market nearly instantly. It really is an "almost spiritual faithfulness", they are commpletely confident iPhone will prevail based on a video clip. This isn't to say that everyone who is excited about iPhone has this religious zeal, but there certainly is a crowd that has completely bought into the image advertising to an extremely high degree.

[theFIRMbss]

>People like stuff that works the way it's supposed to

------------------------------------------------------
Your brain may be determining what car you buy before you've even taken a test drive. A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains. The findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

"This is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) test examining the power of brands," said Christine Born, M.D., radiologist at University Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. "We found that strong brands activate certain areas of the brain independent of product categories." ...

[MRI Shows Brains Respond Better To Name Brands, Radiological Society of North America Date: November 30, 2006] ------------------------------------------------------

But most Mac users
have no computer background.
They've no idea

what computers are
supposed to do or not do.
People like Apple

because commercials
for Apple have created
social perceptions

among "mainstream types"
that Apple users are cool.
Advertising has

colonized their mind.
It changes the way they think.
They think they are cool

because "Apple's cool"
and they buy and use Apples.
The word "zombie" fits.

[The_Victor]

lol!

[D-fendr]

you forgot the tinfoil hat alert...

[Richard Kimball]

I always thought of him as Andy Rooney, but not as pleasant or good looking.

[fso301]

The iPhone will take the San Francisco crowd by storm.

By default it will have toothing enabled

[theFIRMbss]

>The iPhone will take the San Francisco crowd by storm. By default it will have toothing [?] enabled

-----------------------------------------------------------------

It appears that toothing started around March 2004, in the form of a fake forum designed by Ste Curran, then Editor at Large at games magazine Edge, and ex-journalist Simon Byron. On April 4, 2005, the creators of the forum admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.[1] In toothing, a Bluetooth device is used to 'discover' other enabled devices within about 30 feet (10 meters), then send the expression toothing? as an initial greeting. In addition, or when sending of text messages via Bluetooth is not possible, the Bluetooth name of the phone can be set to toothing? or something else to indicate interest. Since the hoax, there have been real bluetooth dating devices to hit the market.

Although created as a hoax, bluetoothing merged the very credible concepts of short-range wireless networking and desire for sexual partners. Recent news from more credible sources shows some evidence of real usage of Bluetooth for this purpose in (generally concurred) public places. Given the limited functionality and poor usability of standard Bluetooth implementations to support messaging, it is not surprising that wider usage of it would only arise in extreme dating situations. Bluetoothing is an example of localized social networking, which is becoming increasingly popular.

[Toothing at Wikipedia]

[theFIRMbss]

>Advertising has colonized their mind
>>you forgot the tinfoil hat alert...

If you make fun of my religion, I'll have to strap on a cream pie . . .