What should Apple have done?
When they realized that the iPhone was a success and that future sales volume would likely allow them to produce and sell iPhones for cheaper and still remain profitable, should they have artificially kept the price high as a "thank you" to early adopters? Early adopters who should have been responsible consumers in the first place and for whom $200 should not be a hardship, I might add?
Or should Apple somehow have known how successful a completely new product was going to be in a completely new and highly competitive market and start out pricing the iPhone for high volume sales?
Or should Apple give a 100 million dollars back to people who are already overwhelmingly happy with their iPhones and who willingly and enthusiastically shelled it out to begin with?
Look, Apple took incredible risks with the iPhone, and by buying one yourself in the early days, you accepted those risks too. Apple combined brand new hardware, software, and a completely different interface in a new device in a fierce market in which they've never done business before, and they've apparently pulled it off with great success.
And it might not have worked out that way at all. If Apple had sold just 25,000 iPhones in the first two months, they might have been faced with the decision of having to scrap the product altogether, and then all the early adopters, myself included, would be stuck with a dead-end phone. Instead, it looks like they're going to sell millions of them, and that their very bold move is going to pay off for a long time.
I knew going in that these were both possible outcomes among many, and that not knowing which of these was going to actually occur was just the risk of being an early adopter. You should have known this too. You had enough information available to you on the day you bought your iPhone to know that there were risks involved, including potentially buying a dead-end product, or one that needed to be radically redesigned due to shortcomings, etc. Fortunately, neither of these things happened. So you can blame Apple and "protest" by refusing to by their products ever again if you want to, but you're just depriving yourself of using incredibly innovative products from a company that is willing to take huge risks, which sometimes requires some patience and adaptability from its early adopter customers.
