Posted on 09/06/2007 1:38:46 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc, faced with an outcry from iPhone customers who bought the device before a sharp price cut, will offer them a $100 store credit, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said on Thursday.
The offer applies to people who bought iPhones at either Apple or AT&T Inc stores and not receiving rebates or other considerations, Jobs said in a letter posted on Apple's Web site.
While Apple has not disclosed how many units it has sold to date, it has reported selling 270,000 iPhones on the first two days and expects to sell 1 million units by the end of September, potentially costing the company tens of millions of dollars.
Apple shares fell 1.2 percent to $135.06 in late afternoon trading on Nasdaq.
"Even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price," Jobs said.
Apple also has a policy to refund the difference to customers who bought a product within 14 days of a price drop.
On Wednesday, Apple slashed the price of its $600 iPhone model to $400, saying it wanted to make the device -- a combination cell phone, music player and Web browser -- more affordable. AT&T is the exclusive service provider for the device.
Web sites and online forums were quickly inundated with messages from irate iPhone buyers, some of whom felt that they had been punished for their early support.
"Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these," Jobs said.
Jobs' full statement can be read at www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/
If? The thing’s selling like hotcakes still, and we’re coming up on the Christmas shopping season. Sales are only going to increase.
I understood the sales were below company projections. If not, I stand corrected.
Just my kids old Pentium III PC that I bought from Gateway back in October 1998.
Glenn Beck actually had a funny bit about Apple today. Seems their support isn’t quite what it used to be. The transcript can be found here:
http://www.glennbeck.com/news/09052007a.shtml
That's what's keeping me from getting one.
I’m interested in the new iPod that receives wi-fi signals and has Safari. There are enough places that get wi-fi that it would be like having an ultra-small Mac.
Ed
So you're basically using it as a toy. I'm still doing work on my G3.
The ipod Touch is a nice stab in AT&T's back. Expect the iphone to crash soon.
/actually I didn't. Just making a point.
Well, you could look at it that way, or you could see what's as plain as the nose on Steve Job's face, and expect the voiphone. He's all about synergy and using existing tech in surprising, elegant and useful ways.
Maybe somebody will hack the thing and write a third-party VoIP app to do exactly that.
Gee, and you wonder why people call Mac users condescending...
Here’s something that should really irk you, those new all mighty Intel Macs they’re selling for around $1500, yeah, you could build an identical machine with a 19’ wide screen LCD for around $600.
So you’re basically paying more than twice the price for a PC, not really all that smart if you ask me...
Oh, don't be so thin-skinned, lol. It's just a bit of a hangover from hearing the exact, same "toy" remark from pocket-protecter PC geeks for twenty years, that's all. Let me have my little table-turning fun, spoilsport.
At $399, Apple won't make a lot of money on the phone. It will make the big bucks on the kickbacks from AT&T, which are estimated at $150 per phone plus $9 per month per phone for a minimum of 2 years. Apple will easily MAKE more than $400 per phone, probably over $500.
And they have to go to APPL to redeem it-this will drive their store counts up right in time for Christmas.
Smart move.
Just wait until VOIP enabled WIMAX hits its stride.
ATT just got jammed.
As far as productivity and old PC’s go, it all depends on what you’re doing with it. Old PC’s work fine for word processing and other like tasks. Many of my engineering programs will run on old PC’s with Win2k but execution time is important as many of these type programs are very demanding. So I upgrade to newer faster hardware to save time, not because it failed.
If you are talking about still functional, then I still have my IBM PC 1 (the very first version). It came with 16k of RAM and a monochrome monitor... I upgraded the RAM to 640k, added a second color monitor (it worked with two monitors at the same time) added dual floppies, added a 20 MB hard drive, added a real time clock so I didn’t have to type the date and time in every time it was booted. I got rid of the color monitor many years ago and the hard drive was replaced with a more modern one about 15 years ago and the rest of it still works like the day I bought it.
Somebody's gotta pay for the R&D, glad it isn't me.
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