“The anguish and frustration of Indian mobile fascinates and users, who had long been waiting for the launch of iPhone 4S in India, erupted within a matter of few hours of announcement of the cost of iPhone 4S on the websites of Aircel and Bharti Airtel on Friday,” Shreya Basu reports for News Tonight.
“In no time, the social networking media was overflowing with comments disdaining the smartphone maker Apple. The launch price of iPhone in India is Rs 44,500 and evidently, it will be much more costly in India than in the rest of the world,” Basu reports. “Customers are fuming with the fact that the retail price of Apple iPhone 4S in India is much more than its retail price in the United States.”
Basu reports, “However, the situation holds no novelty for Apple or Indian users, for that matter. Starting from iPods, Apple products have always been priced considerably higher in India as compared to other nations like Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Its not Apple’s fault.
As Cult of Mac’s John Brownlee reported with the iPhone 4’s launch in India, “In most of the world, when you buy an iPhone, you pay a small initial fee upfront, but the rest of the handset’s price is baked into your two year contract, which you pay off in monthly installments. In India, though? It’s totally backwards… and totally bizarre… Instead of the carrier subsidizing the cost of your iPhone, in India, you essentially subsidize Aircel to provide service to the iPhone 4 for you for the next twenty four months, with Aircel ‘paying you back’ in airtime credits over the course of two years until you, as they claim, ‘recover 100 percent of your upfront iPhone cost.'”
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