Tale #21 - The Tale Of Phones And Cancelled Plans

Hi, all!

Well... remember how I said I was going to see Pixar's recent movie on the weekend? Well... turns out my friends had prior commitments and couldn't go with me. So instead, we're going to see it on wednesday. So I guess you'll hear a bit more then.

Anyways, the daily sketches are going to be posted later, but right now I'm going to talk about Apple's new Phone.

As you all know, it was released just recently, but two things really got me thinking there and is starting to actually cause me to doubt the phone's success. The first thing was the price.

That phone costs between 500$-600$ US for a 2-year contract (This, I don't think includes the price of the phone itself either!)... and if you converted that to Canadian, it's more closer to 700$ (Give or take... it's a rounded off estimate, guys) which is almost like paying one grand for a phone. Now doesn't that seem a little STEEP? This means that only people with plenty of money to spair and pretty much burning a hole in their pocket will be able to afford this. Now you're probably thinking why would the price totally effect the success? The answer comes in the form of another steeply price electronic item - The PS3. By Sony's standards and pretty much a lot of other people, that this was a huge failure for their gaming division. When it first rolled out, you were pretty much expected to pay 1,200$ to get your hands on one of these. Yeah... sure... it had decent drive space, can read BluRay disks, and had excellent graphic quality. But not many people were going to pay that price tag unless they were die hard Sony fans. To everyone else, they wouldn't dare wanna pick it up. The first signs of trouble for this doomed consol was when the Head Of Sony was trying so hard to justify his logic for the price. I mean if you have to justify a price and invent an excuse, you already know that it's going to be hell. Then after that, Sony pulled its' 20gig model from the shelves and discontinued them after a few months. After that, the Head of Sony stepped down and it was just perpetually going down hill from there considering you can pick up a Xbox 360 AND a Wii plus some games just to make up for the price of 1 PS3 with NO games. To me personally, the PS3 seems like an over glorafied stripped down version of my computer. Even my laptop is cheaper and has way more features than a PS3... oh! And My computers can definately play games too. So seeing this happen with the PS3 because of the price leads me to think of a similar fate to Apple's new phone. Maybe it won't be so extreme, but it'll definately force Apple's hand a bit in order to avoid Sony's fate.

The second thing is that the Phone is going to be available to the US and the UK but NOT Canada? Canada is practically the US's next door neighbour and almost everything from America makes it over to Canada and has the potential to do well. And let's not forget that the Canadian market is also quite big. So why did Apple exclude it? It just doesn't make any sense at all. I mean Canada has similar electrical and phone systems to America already. So converting it over to a Canadian version shouldn't be a huge hastle as it would for a UK version. But yet... they're working on a UK version anyways? I don't really understand that kind of logic. This is almost as odd as the AppleTV logic which is STILL not available in Canada. Because you're excluding a major market, that means that sales wouldn't be as strong as it could be.

So what's the solution? Well... part of it is to release the Phone to Canada. There's no need to totally explain that one. The second part of the solution is to make the Phone cheaper. I mean one way is to have some form of sponsorship program like LiveJournal does for its' blog-domains and have some of the advertising pay half the price. Which if they did that, and made it about 300$ (Give or take... again, an estimate, guys....), it's far more competitive against something like a BlackBerry and far more reasonable. But that's just one solution of many right there of a methode to make the Phone cheaper. But as it stands right now, Apple had better think fast to turn things around for their new Phone before it ends up like the PS3.

Anyways, see you all later, guys! ^^