Apple to announce iPhone and iPod Touch price cuts?
Hold onto your hard-earned for just a few weeks more
Apple is planning to drop the prices of the iPhone and iPod line within the next month or two - perhaps at a rumoured late February announcement - a Mac enthusiast site has climed.
Website 9to5Mac received word that the cuts are on their way. The reduction is said to be $100 off the price of models in both the iPod Touch and iPhone lines. The 8GB iPod Touch will apparently be dropped from the line-up just as the 4GB version of the iPhone was before it.
If true, this means that the 16GB iPhone will be $399 - the current price for the 8GB version and the 32GB iPod Touch will come in at $399 too. Speculation suggests that the price drops are in order to make way for "pricing space" for the 3G iPhone, expected this year.
Speculation for this announcement dates back to October last year, when Steve Jobs promised, via a post on the Apple website, that the company would release a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
"We plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February," were the exact words as regards timescale, so rumours of an Apple event scheduled for late-February are not entirely surprising.
In addition to the price cuts and the expected software development kit, rumours abound that a Penryn-based MacBook Pros with multi-touch trackpad might also be announced.
COMMENTS
Pah
I understand them dropping the price once, and giving store credit - but to do it a second time would seriously undermine consumer confidence, and make everyone think twice about buying any iPhone products in the future.
@Greg
When does a company need to announce a price cut? The proper way is if you have a new product coming out, you drop the price of the old or just discontinue it and bring the new one in at the price point you want.
Memory prices fall all of the time. If you buy a mirco-SD card and in a few months when it is about half the price when it was when you bought it, do you complain and ask for a credit?
Technology gets cheaper; always has and always will.
From the "no sh1t Sherlock" department
So Apple will reduce the price of a premium product in the future. You mean like every other product in the world then?
Of course it will happen - even more so if they're about to introduce a "premium" version of the iPhone (think 3G, and probably with 32Gb flash to match the Touch and further differentiate).
Is the iPod like the Big Mac index of consumer electronics?
I only ask, because it would make a lot of sense to use the iPod: only a few rigidly priced retailers; clockwork price reduction mechanism; Apple take a very stable cut of the RRP/BOM difference. Hmmm...
Love the negativity
Don't buy. Wait for the Osbourne II. It's coming.
No... wait for the G3 iPhone. It's coming.
No, the price is dropping.
Just type it buddy. Please don't buy Apple products right now. I'm short the stock, and need next quarters numbers to look terrible so I can buy my new iPhone.
Bullocks.
