“Apple has good reason to be gearing up [iPhone] for this holiday season based upon its experience with the iPod. Steve Jobs made an incredibly gutsy call last year in the spring when he told manufacturing to gear up to make more than 20 million iPods to sell over the holidays. Why was it gutsy? Because Apple had never sold more than 14 million iPods in a quarter before. Yet the decision had to be made, and Jobs and his team made it. And it is sounding like Jobs has recently made that same decision with the iPhone by doubling iPhone production for this holiday season too,” Carl Howe writes for Blackfriars’ Marketing.
“So with production ramped up for the holidays, is Apple going to [lower and lower iPhone prices and] follow Motorola into the downward price spiral of death?” Howe asks.
“Oh sure. And it will happen right after Steve Jobs attends an ice skating party in hell with bad Muzak,” Howe writes.
“What people don’t get is that Apple is waging a marketing war to reshape the value chain for the mobile phone industry… By bundling ‘free’ and generic phones with cell phone service, mobile carriers have devalued both the brand values of the handset makers and their own services… Because Apple is providing valuable carrier differentiation, Apple can then capture the subsidy revenue stream that the carrier would have normally paid to the handset manufacturers anyway for ‘free’ (and undesirable) phones,” Howe explains.
“So Apple is going to use its iPod playbook all over again. The original 5 gigabyte iPod went on sale for $399 in 2001. Today, a 16 gigabyte iPod touch sells for — you guessed it — $399,” Howe writes. “A constant set of features will move down the price scale to more value-oriented price points, but Apple will introduce new and even more desirable products at the old price points. And so long as it can keep that engine going, it will make money hand over fist.”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
When is Rogers going to get off their a??es and offer the iPhone in Canada?
When will someone else come in to offer this and end run Rogers?
Speaking of Zunes,
For those who were asleep (or under a rock) sometime late May/early June, Microsoft blasted, with much fanfare, that they have shipped (or were on track to ship) one million Zunes before end of June.
If the link in my post doesn’t work, take seven seconds to google “Microsoft sells one million Zunes’.
Everyone was congratulating Ballmer and patting him on the back for a job well done…
MS clearly has obviously set their bar impossibly high and have deserved to pat themselves on the back for such an amazing accomplishment (putting it in perspective: Apple sells that many iPods in a week…).
This seems to be a a trend nowadays. Treating proper names in singular as if they were plural when in possessive form is not proper English.
Jobs’ gutsy strategy, written this way, implies that tere are many people named Jobs and this was their strategy. (as in: girls’ night out, singers’ voices, etc).
Instead, proper way to spell it is by following its pronunciation:
Jobs’s gutsy strategy.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to root out this type of error, and brands, such as “Thomas’ English Muffins” don’t help (if you say it “Thomasses English muffins”, how can you not spell it Thomas’s… etc? Where did that other ‘s’ that you just said come from?).
I’ll wrap this diatribe here. I may not be an English native speaker, but it still irks me when online publications with rather large audience make grammatical errors. It doesn’t help cultivate our language skills.
@algore et. al.:
But here’s the rest of the quote you left out:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection…
I find it useful to include the whole sense of a quotation, not just the segment that appears to support you conjecture.