Will Apple announce a $99 iPhone on Monday?
By Ronald O Carlson
An analyst’s survey indicates cutting the zeitgeist and industry-defining handset’s price by $100 could increase demand by 100 percent. That would certainly shake things up.
AT&T let it be known last week that it’s considering lower cost iPhone plans with the cut built around a reduced data plan with $40 a month being floated as a potential asking price. Of course, the carrier is only half of the price reduction equation.
Quoting Kathryn Huberty of Morgan Stanley, Financial Times (FT) claims that Apple will cut the price of the iPhone by $50 or $100. That said those two numbers just happen to be the amounts used by the aforementioned analyst in a survey of consumers on the potential impact an iPhone price cut would have on sales.
“It’s either a $50 or a $100 cut,” says Huberty.
Of course, those are nice round Applesque numbers (i.e. the resulting prices are $149 and $99) and they certainly do have curb appeal. Further, the analyst adds that a Morgan Stanley survey of consumers showed a $50 reduction would increase unit volume by 50 percent and $100 cut would double iPhone sales.
Right sized or crippled?
Neither the analyst nor FT speculates what the specifications of $99 iPhone might be, though the path of least resistance for Apple would be to offer a nominally different version of its current 8GB model. There have been many rumors of a nano or lite product, but these haven’t taken any particular form and generally have been put down false.
Of course, the upfront cost of a handset is but a small fraction of the total cost of ownership, a bit more than 10 percent of the current iPhone’s base lifetime cost, which brings us back to the questions of what AT&T is planning and what we hope they’ll deliver.
Will you rollover and beg for a $99 handset plus $49 per month iPhone package? I would if Verizon was the carrier doing the offering…
What’s your take?
See also:
— Source indicates 4, 8, 16, 32 GB iPhones coming
— AT&T formally announces 7.2Mbps upgrade plans
— AT&T: ‘Yes, we are thinking about gutting the iPhone data plan’
— Verizon, Apple in talks regarding ‘media pad,’ ‘iPhone lite …
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June 5th, 2009
Actually, some rumors I’ve seen have a $99 8GB iPhone, $129 16GB iPhone, and $199 32GB iPhone.
That might be worthwhile in that you can upsell the people who come in for the $99 version (”Pay an extra $30 and we double the space! By the time you get all your music, videos, pictures, and apps, you’re not gonna have room…”)