How they will sell iPhone in Australia and other similar markets
The Basics:
1. The iPhone gets unlocked, and offered for sale in Apple stores for whatever price Apple set. You take it away and you find your own network, whichever you want.
2. At the same time, they are also selling it to the carriers at wholesale rates (which on Apple hardware is usually about 90% of the retail price anyway) who can then offer it to their customers on the huge variety of plans & contracts they use on all their other phones.
3. You get to choose - buy it outright from Apple or sign up for a subsidised iPhone from Telstra or Vodaphone or whoever you like.
The Little Details:
a. It's quite legal for a carrier in Oz to offer a phone on a locked in plan, as long as there are other, competitive ways for consumers to get and use the phone. Ie: more than one carrier offers it, or there is a buy outright option in the market where you can then take YOUR device to the carrier of YOUR choice. Our ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) just doesn't like the 'you can't use it on any other carrier, ever, and you'll lose your warranty if you do' bit.
b. It is just possible that Apple could exclusively sell it THROUGH one carrier, and not stock it in their own stores. This would be legal as well - a firm can sign an exclusive agreement with a local carrier to resell their product - but they can't sell it themselves and then force you to use a specific carrier after that. It's a subtle but important difference. However, I don't see this happening because Apple really, really want their stores to become the premium Apple retail destination and if, just to get around a legal difficulty, they didn't stock their own iPhones it would ruin the whole Apple retail strategy.
c. Apple probably don't care all that much any more about getting ongoing subscription revenue from the iPhone. Sure, it's nice and all, and it gave a solid, immediate profit from day 1 of the iPhone's introduction - but in the long term, the real money is to be made from the iTunes store model. Apple aren't dumb - they probably figured this from the start, but they also knew that it would take a couple years to get it up and running.
So why not launch, get a year or two of subscription revenue to keep the profit stream up and then, as the end game of software and media sales to the device starts to get close, dump the restrictions on sales and just get the thing into as many people's hands as you can (without, of course, destroying the brand in the process). It's a hand-off from one revenue stream to another, potentially much bigger one and it also avoids all the legal problems.
d. They might, just, give one carrier a short head start in reselling the device - whoever gives them a nice premium price for the first shipment probably. But only for a month or two - then it will be all (telco) comers.
e. I had another point but I've forgotten it.
templar. it is the i-crystal. As a speech recognition device powered by solar light, it beams its holographic interface as it hangs in ones window. it even comes with its own wireless string.
