The news today is a memo AT&T Wireless has sent to their retail stores with instructions on how to handle questions regarding the iPhone. AppleInsider has the lowdown, as well as a picture of the actual memo.
Two pieces of information stand out to me. From the memo:
Sales for the iPhone will be on a first come, first served basis.
That means customers will be camping out at an Apple store or an AT&T Wireless store if they want an iPhone anytime soon. It also means iPhones will be selling on eBay for thousands of dollars.
The second juicy detail is the wording regarding the price of the iPhone. The memo instructs stores to tell people the "4gb will retail at $499 and the 8gb will retail $599." The use of the word retail here is clever and leaves the door open to subsidized pricing. Who has ever paid retail for a phone?
Even subsidized, the iPhone still will have to cost more than most iPods; more specifically, it has to cost more than a nano, Apple's bestseller. Why would customers buy an 8gb nano if they could get an iPhone cheaper? Apple may not want to cannibalize their iPod sales.
However, maybe they should go ahead and do it. After all, weren't there 1 billion phones sold last year compared to something like 130 million mp3 players?
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