Vintage iPhone Claim Chowder

Bill Ray, writing for The Register in late December 2006:

Apple will launch a mobile phone in January, and it will become available during 2007. It will be a lovely bit of kit, a pleasure to behold, and its limited functionality will be easy to access and use.

The Apple phone will be exclusive to one of the major networks in each territory and some customers will switch networks just to get it, but not as many as had been hoped.

As customers start to realise that the competition offers better functionality at a lower price, by negotiating a better subsidy, sales will stagnate. After a year a new version will be launched, but it will lack the innovation of the first and quickly vanish.

Oftentimes pundits can accurately predict almost exactly what Apple will do, but are incredibly wrong about how customers will react to it. By December 2006, there were very strong signs that an Apple mobile phone was imminent, and Ray got it almost exactly right: exquisite design, exclusive to one carrier.

The rest, not so much.

★ Thursday, 20 February 2014