Sure, it hasn’t crashed like the prices of televisions, or like computers did in the 80s and 90s. But it’s still meaningfully cheaper and of course much more capable (the original iPhone didn’t even launch with an App Store!).
- no app store
- no video recording at all
- no copy/paste function
- no selfie camera
- no GPS
Just to name a few. I won't even go into things like touch/faceID, wireless charging, iCloud, any form of water resistance etc.
And then in terms of the specs on what it did have that got better, processor, memory, storage, screen quality, battery life, camera, it's all orders of magnitude better. There really is no comparison.
I mean look at the price of a digital camera, music player etc, hell even external battery pack in 2007, with the same specs as the iPhone today, and you'll easily find support for using the words 'hefty price drop'.
It took about three years to get all the features in your bulleted list. It's been another fifteen and a half years since.
Touch/faceID is cheap, wireless charging is cheap, the free tier of iCloud is cheap, water resistance is cheap.
Yes the specs have increased a ton. When asking for a model under $500, the idea would be giving up some of those specs. And that's clearly possible; even low end phones these days are a zillion times better than an original iPhone.
And no I will not look at non-iPhone things when I'm evaluating whether iPhones underwent a hefty price drop. The cheapest iPhone these days is slightly cheaper than a first or second generation iPhone, and the best one is a lot more expensive.
Yes it was the iPhone 4 and it was $649, or $968 in today's money for 16gb of storage.
That mean's today's cheapest iPhone is 40% cheaper than this base model you're referring to, as well as being tons better. If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
That's for the 16gb by the way, the next year's 64gb would've constituted a 53% price drop today.
And that's still for a wildly different phone. You're getting way, way more value today. Longevity alone is easily twice as long, meaning the cost-per-use or cost-per-year can be halved, leading to >75% price drops.
The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly. Apple has a long line of phones available for purchase on the secondary market, refurbished market, old-model market, is known to replace batteries 7 years after discontinuing the sale, and can be replaced with non-official batteries as well.
Like you could literally buy an iPhone 12 on the secondary market for $50 and do a $39 battery replacement, or buy it fully refurbished for $150. You can buy a million android phones at any spec level. The idea that Apple should compete at this budget with its own old phones and android phones is a bad idea and the idea Apple entry level phones aren't much cheaper, have more longevity and have wildly better specs than before, is empirically not true.
Is it technically possible for Apple to create a $400 phone that's still much better than the original iPhone? Obviously I agree with you that it is. Does it make sense for Apple to do it? Obviously not.
In this thread you'll have people saying 60 hertz is ridiculous in 2026 on an iPhone 17, and people saying they're completely fine with iPhone 12 specs in 2026 and wanting to get more discounts for fewer specs (ignoring the fact you can indeed simply buy that iPhone 12). The remaining market is so slim it's not worth getting into, but you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones.
> If you don't think 40% is a hefty price drop then idk what to tell you.
For 15 years of tech product, it's not.
For a tech product to stay the same price in dollars for so long is not great. And remember that the 17 itself is $799. This is the discount model and it's still way over the $500 bar.
> The idea Apple should be going even beyond that to make low-end new phones for a company that positions itself at the top of the market, is just silly.
It's silly because you took the thing being complained about, the positioning, and made it part of the premise. Anything sounds silly if you do that.
> you can't please everyone with a lineup of 5 phones
5 phones is plenty to cover a big range if they wanted to. Pro and Pro Max isn't needed, and the Air is totally unnecessary with how close it is to a normal model.
Though for market coverage I wouldn't say low end first, I would say new SE model. I bet a 4.3 inch screen would sell a lot better than the Air's thinness.
Alright I guess we simply disagree, it's getting a bit out of hand to argue this case, and to be honest also a bit silly. Apple's best selling phones are the Pro and Max, which you want to scrap, and you advocate for a 4.3 inch screen when the iPhone mini was Apple's biggest flop phone. I'm not really interested fleshing out why that doesn't make sense if it isn't obvious.
You also think a 50% discount is not much which we just have a disagreement about, no point arguing that further. But to expect an even cheaper lineup with lower specs just doesn't make sense and we've covered the obvious reasons already. For one, Apple has tons of competition at that price/spec level. And secondly, Apple already made hundreds of millions of such phones (they're called years-old models) which anyone can buy with new batteries at the price level you're talking about (<$400). To bring out additional new models that compete with its old models and other brands brings little additional revenue and even smaller margins, the opposite of what drives Apple's market cap. With respect it looks to me like there's a reason you're not CEO of Apple and that Apple isn't taking your advice to bring out another iPhone mini flop or low-budget competitor.
