by Jason Snell
Steven Sinofsky on Apple’s iPhone dilemma
Steven Sinofsky, formerly of Microsoft, has a good Twitter thread about Apple’s iPhone pricing issues:
Pricing not only says who can afford your product but also establishes a brand, determines channel, & more. Many say Apple is a luxury brand; certainly they focused on that. Clearly more recently prices have gone up in real terms….
At MS we always reminded ourselves that you don’t sell 300M of something at one every day low price. Most all energy was to maintain price floor. AMAZINGLY Apple managed to sell over 200M of something per year at pretty much one every day high price, then increased price.
Apple’s got a lot of difficult choices to make with the iPhone, and the changes in iPhone pricing and strategy the last two years had to have been difficult ones. It’ll be interesting to see how the company adapts to the changing smartphone market in 2019 without doing lasting harm to its most valuable and profitable product line.