Pricing it low would have the effect of short term financial gain but at the expense of commoditising the iPhone's brand. Which would make people far less willing to spend the extra money on the 5S (which has the larger margins).
When you get to the $850 iPhone with 64GB of memory, the profit margin is generally around 75%.
As in, it costs them $215 to make a $850 device.
Apple rarely dips below 40% margin on it's products it seems.
Now that Apple has over $100,000,000,000.00 in it's little hedge fund and has become the largest fund in the world (iirc), I've begun to look at the iPhone as the worlds most successful hedge fund capital raising scheme.
Apple is positioning itself as the luxury brand you can afford.
"Bahnhofstrasse is Zurich's main downtown street and one of the world's most expensive and exclusive shopping avenues. In 2011, a study named the Bahnhofstrasse the most expensive street for retail property in Europe, and the third most expensive worldwide.[1]"
It very much looks as if they are positioning themselves along those super luxury brands.
Chanel perfume can be bought for $100; a Chanel suit for $2000.
A new Ferrari will cost $300,000; a Ferrari T-shirt is $75.
An $850 iPhone fits nicely into this, especially as it it has a similar level of design quality.
That's a western male perspective. In Asia (including India), adults will jump to get those colors. (And women in the West too).
Your contribution was to declare which opinions belong to each sexist grouping you architected. You have said, "Your opinion is a western male one," but I doubt you know PP's origin, so you are shooting in the dark.
You have said, "Asians are like _this_. Women are like _that_. Men are like _this_. Indians are _that_." That is prejudicial, and even worse, normative, behavior by you, compelling others to conform. If I were an Asian adult who didn't like the colors, your comments might make me feel hurt right now, whereas PP's comment was acceptable.
They might 'jump to get' good value for money. The IPhones have never been seen as good value for money in the Indian market, and have truly miniscule market share. Bright colors won't help.
These kind of generalizations - emerging market customers are fools who can be bamboozled by bright colored cases and very expensive phones that are one generation (or more) behind the truly cutting edge phones - shows Apple is clueless about how to succeed in emerging markets. Which is ok - they can stick to America/Europe and make tonnes of money.
We'll see in a year or two if they can crack the Chinese markets, with these plastic phones. I doubt it somehow.
I genuinely think this opinion might be the result of a filter bubble or its "real life" equivalent. I don't care for the bright colors personally, but I think the white 5c looks excellent (a black one would be even better). I still prefer the metal casing (plus the tech specs are important to me), so I'll choose the 5s if I decide to upgrade, but I can absolutely understand why a huge portion of potential buyers would prefer the plastic case, especially people who aren't particularly concerned with having the most blazing new chip or the fingerprint sensor. In fact, even among gadget geeks, I can see many choosing the plastic design specifically because it is plastic. I have heard a lot of disappointment about the fragility of metal iPhones since the debut of the iPhone 4.
Conjecture: these will be the free-with-contract phones next year, and something else will occupy the $100 slot.
This seems to be a problem. Hmm buy the inferior product, or spend a mere 3 weeks service to buy the top of the line. Duh I'll buy the top of the line. If I wanted to save money I'd just get an android phone from Republic Wireless for $19 like VLM did on Hacker News (I'm a happy customer). Therefore since I'm already contemplating the 2nd most expensive option out there, and possibly the 2nd best option out there, may as well pay a tiny bit more for the best one.
If I want to blow $30 on an expensive bottle of wine, there's no way in hell I'm paying $31 for an inferior bottle sitting next to a superior $32 bottle. If I wanted to save money I wouldn't participate in that market anyway.
And that is the marketing plan I think they're using. I don't think they'll sell any of the cheaper ones.
iPhone 5S: $1,160 over two years iPhone 5C: $1,060 over two years
I go to ATT.com, click on wireless and the cheapest contract voice is $40/month and the cheapest data is $20/month and I'm continually informed I'm the only living human being who doesn't text, so thats another $20/month plus taxes. So thats $80/month for the absolute minimum. 300 megs of data a month? Really? I don't think you could keep up with app updates alone much less actually "do" anything with only 300 megs/month. So you're more realistically $90 for 3 gigs or $110 for 5 gigs, before taxes of course.
I only download or update apps on my home Wifi connection though, and I use Opera browser which does a lot of caching.
BTW I'm still amazed at the incredibly expensive plans in the U.S. (there are lots of threads here with comparisons, and the U.S. is among the most expensive). I pay USD 20/month for my contract (voice + SMS, and we don't pay for incoming calls, caller pays) plus USD 5 per 384 megabytes.
Edit: link to one of the previous discussions
You probably don't want to have automatic over the air app updates enabled. In fact, I'm not even sure if that's an option. Honestly, 300 MB/month would be sufficient for most months even for me, and I'm a fairly heavy user on LTE. I pay for the 2GB plan mostly to cover months where my usage peaks. I suspect that 8 months a year I use less than 300 MB/month, and I use iTunes Match, occasional video streaming, and occasional Facetime calls.
More realistically, she already has a plan with a monthly payment. Which she is not even considering at this point. All she cares is how much it will cost her right now. $100 could make a difference.
Only thing I'm disappointed in is the camera, but that's why I have my Canon.
The 8GB N4 is £159. You can grab it from here https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_4_8_GB?i...
It's notable there's no black (or 'slate') 5C. I guess if one wants a more 'dignified' (again, a matter of taste) one has to go 5S.
I commend to all the interesting Steve Jobs quote found at the end of the comment by markwilcox:
"What ruined Apple was not growth … They got very greedy … Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible … they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years. What this cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share." - Steve Jobs.
As a long-time Apple fan and former shareholder I'll be very interested to see how this pans out.