A point is being missed here
I've been lurking here forever; this debate has gotten me hot enough to sign up and post.... it's NOT about what the price was on June 29th.. for me, its that Apple and At&T USED me, and others like us, to sort out their launch, and in effect charged us $200 / phone to do so. If the price were $399 at launch, there would have been many more "early converters"; making AT&T's dismal launch performance even more unpalpable.... at the $599 price, it sort of limited sales to crazy Apple fans, or people with alot of disposable income.
My iPhone experience since June 29th has been less than steller.... on June 29th, I purchased 3 8G iphones.....
Get home and cant get ONE activated through AT&T to port my numbers from Verizon, So At&T customer support advises me to start up three "new" accounts while I wait a week for the dust to settle. After nearly a month it all finally gets sorted out, (numbers got ported) only I had to return two of the phones (one twice) for various reasons... (one wouldn't charge, the other touch screen was dead).
A few weeks later I get a thousand (literally) pages in bills from At&T, who now have me registered for SIX iphones and have a bill of over a thousand dollars! -They never cancelled my "temporary" accounts and rolled them into my ported numbers! -after they promised me they did! Yep! activation fees, the whole nine! Took me endless calls, and lots and lots of aggravation to get this sorted out....
When I finally did, my iphone stops working (the bottom row on the touch screen is dead when I am in phone mode) - so manually dialing a number - a bare necessity if you are in business, and need to call someone not in your contacts list- is impossible!
I now have to wake up at midnight to schedule an iphone "genius" appointment, or deal with the attitude laden kids at my not so local Apple Store - Oh... and for all this, I got to pay $200 EXTRA so that Apple, and At&T could learn how to market, price, activate and service this device, but they needed me and the others who got raped here, to be the early adopters (and made us pay for it) so they could figure this out.
My first mac - in a long line too long to post i my sigs - was a "Mac SE" in 1987.... I had the first powerbook -(the 100); had Newtons... you get the idea... I KNOW Apple... I know their business practices... been upset before when prices drop and lines get discontinued in favor of improvements... all that before was normal... BUT THIS IS A RIPOFF!
I HAVE LOST FAITH! APPLE IS SCREWING OVER THEIR MOST LOYAL, MOST CHAMPION CUSTOMERS WHO CARRY THE FLAG FOR THE BRAND AND RECOMMEND APPLE PRODUCTS TO OUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CO-WORKERS.
This is unacceptable, and anything less than a $200 credit at the Apple store (which is easy to do, because you KNOW we will buy more than $200 worth of Apple products in the next 6 months) is unacceptable in my book!