Don’t look now, but Apple’s getting aggressive on pricing; so aggressive that it might make rivals with much thinner margins break out in a sweat.
Apple Inc.’s biggest surprise at its keynote address on Tuesday was not a new feature, device, or service, but an aggressive pricing strategy that’s a departure for the premium electronics maker.
The iPhone 11 starts at $699, down from the iPhone XR’s $749 price last year. The XR stays in the lineup for $599, a $150 decrease for a phone that’s only a year old. That’s one of the biggest year-over-year reductions in iPhone history. The iPhone 8 from 2017 now costs $449, also down $150, while the Apple Watch Series 3 from the same year saw its price drop to $199 from $279.
The Apple Arcade gaming service is $4.99 a month, roughly half the cost of Apple Music and Apple News+. The $4.99 monthly cost of Apple’s upcoming TV+ video streaming service surprised many analysts and undercuts Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video, and the Disney+ offering. And when people buy an iPhone and iPad, a Mac or an Apple TV, they get a free year of TV+.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple will have signed up tens of millions of Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade subscribers by this time next year.
Will you subscribe?
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) September 10, 2019
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
About time prices are more reasonable!
UGH! .. Most uneventful announcements ever and what a train wreck the whole event was. Boring watch, boring phone and another useless iPad.. Sorry, but I find 0 value in the iPad (any model) and think they are designed to waste peoples money. Buy a Mac something and be done. Maybe….. On the Apple TV+ but I think subscription models are BS…. Will never pay for more than a few (2-3).
Rob the Troll! Nice try
Rob,
Why can’t owning an iPad be complimentary to owning a Mac laptop or desktop? It is for me. There are many tasks that I can only do on my iPad (with Apple Pencil) that I can’t do on my Macs, and conversely.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the pricing AGGRESSIVE. They held the line on the top-level iPhone device and made old models cheaper.
$5/mo for the streaming service is a good experiment and a necessary loss leader for a startup network. Proof will be in the pudding.
Well I for one will be signing up. Plus getting a new appleTV since you get free TV+ for a year.
I said on Monday before the keynote that the pricing of the service needs to be competitive and it is. We will have to see how much content exists and how much Apple adds each month.
What a strange poll. Why isn’t there a “Neither” option? Without that, the poll is basically meaningless.
I would like for iTunes to implement a system similar to Audible.com where I pay so much per month to accumulate points. I can then use the points to purchase audible content. Let’s say I got up to 10 points and Avengers: Endgame is released and it sells for 2 points. I like that system.