Did anyone folllow through to this link. Not directly related but it makes a good candidate for the I have no idea about Apple's business and I'm going to spend the next article proving it award:
New iPhone could be bad news for O2
We are, I believe, just three or four months away from the next Apple landmark. Will the next iPhone be a top-end replacement; another £500 all singing, all dancing piece of Apple statement making
When was the iPhone ever £500? Even on O2 Pay and Go the top model still doesn't go over £400. The first one was ~£260. I can't remember that exact price.
or a pared-down, circa £250 mass-market Nano phone.
A top-end device would repeat Apples model in iPods and MacBooks of succession products.
No it wouldn't because the business models for Mac and iPod are completely different.
Apple have consistently lowered the price of iPod after its introduction in 2001 to make it a mass market device. They have more recently aggressively lowered the price of the touch in order to pick up market share for the OS X Mobile WiFi Platform by sacrificing profits in the short term.
Meanwhile Apple has positioned the Mac slightly differently in order to maximise margins for that division. There is no point chasing the razor thin margins of PC OEMs as it harms the product which in turn harms the platform.
The major reason the iPod and iPhone are so competitively priced and still profitable is because Apple have leveraged their dominant market position to score very favourable pricing on one of the most expensive components: flash memory.
It follows a rationale that there is a large but limited number of high-spending, gadget-hungry Apple followers, who can be trusted to regularly open their wallets on updates to their existing iPod or laptop.
Large but limited? How does that work? As many iPhone owners are owning an Apple product for the first time this argument falls apart fairly quickly.
