AT&T announced today that the iPhone will be available without contract for an extra $400. Month-by-month customers won’t be granted the right to take their phone to another network, nor will the service plan be reduced in price. (See it in the Seattle PI)
At least one of the following must be true:
- Customers that sign contracts are generally more lucrative
- AT&T needs cash
- Commitment is too cool for Apple fanboys
Who at T-Mobile thinks the Motorola RAZR2 is worth $199 after a contract-subsidy of $170? Seriously, who thinks I’m going to stick around and pay between $199 and $369 for anything other than an iPhone? Anyone other than AT&T really needs to rethink their handset pricing. That means you too Sprint! Why would I buy a Taiwanese touch phone from $299 to $549 (Mogul) when college students everywhere have made it clear that Apple’s “Designed by Apple in California” + OS X is worth so much? (A MacBook Pro 15″ is worth up to twice the cost of a PC with similar internals.)
On that note, where does Apple get the balls to charge only $140 less for a refurbished MacBook Pro than a new one? At my reduced, corporate whore pricing through Apple’s website, a new MacBook Pro 15″ 2.4GHz is $1,839, a refurb’ed unit is $1,699. With nVidia releasing new models yearly (albeit Apple’s uptake of these is more limited), and Intel replacing the front side bus (FSB) with QuickPath Interconnect, featuring an integrated memory controller (yes, like AMD) and reintroducing “simultaneously multi-threading” (AMD again), isn’t there a better deal to be had?
Furthermore, when the hell is the consumer PC market going to move towards EFI? Intel invented the damn specifications and BIOS has been around since forever.
