5 September Apple Announcements

Well, Apple suprised me again. The did refresh the iPod Nano and the iPod Classic to something much more visually appealing. I did not expect that. Nor did I expect the inclusion of WiFi and Safari in the iPod Touch. And neither did I expect the iPhone price to be cut so drastically. $200 of from $600, that's 33% price cut.
But what about the total cost of iPhone ownership? The AT&T subscription? Did that come down too? I just checked, but I could not find any information about it. The cheapest rate is still $59.99 per month for a two year contract. So that's $1439.76 for two years. Add the $599 iPhone to it and you get $2038.76 which is now down to 1838.76, which is slightly more than 10%.

You might argue that all iPhone buyers already have a mobile telephone that would cost them something similar, but I disagree. I'm currently paying €10 per month for my mobile telephone contract and I still have minutes left after each month. So the price of the iPhone has not come down significantly enough for me to buy it. The iPod Touch on the other hand, that's a different story. There are a few things about it that I need to further investigate before I will invest in it.
First of all, it's only 16 GB in capacity, minus the storage for OS X. Currently I've used 53 GB of the 80 GB available on my iPod. And given my preference for album shuffle, I'll only buy one when I'm sure that it will pick out whole albums at random for me to listen to. Although I'm very tempted with the built in browser.

So in the end, the Steve's Reality Distortion Field, which I alluded to in the previous post, did not prove strong enough to wipe out my credit card and buy an iPod Touch.

Zaaf