Assorted Geekery

John Gruber, on today’s controversial announcement that iPhone’s price has dropped $200:

And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.

“Supply and demand”? Seriously? It’s not like we’re talking pork bellies here. That is to say, wildly fluctuating prices based on “supply and demand” are something we expect from publicly traded commodities, not consumer electronics products. Should we expect to see a ticker on apple.com with by-the-minute updates on iPhone pricing?

No, there’s more to this issue than people not understanding capitalism. Those of us who’ve already bought an iPhone knew full well that they’d be hot sellers, and that Apple was making a killing off of them at $599. But this price drop shows that Apple was making more of a killing than anyone could have possibly imagined, more than anyone could have possibly thought was fair. I mean, you could probably figure out the raw cost of a pork belly, but an iPhone is a little harder to pin down. In other words, everyone assumed that the iPhone was priced more-or-less as fairly as Apple’s other products and made our valuation decisions accordingly—and we were wrong.

Assuming that the iPhone and iPod touch are now priced more-or-less as fairly as Apple’s other products, this means one of two things happened:

1. Apple gambled on the crazy-high initial price tag and lost.
2. Apple knew $599 was not sustainable if they wanted to meet their sales goals, and they knowingly screwed over the early adopters.

Either way, Apple tried to screw over customers—it’s just a matter of how many. Personally, my money is on Scenario 2. Scenario 1 would require that they underestimated the iPhone’s sales potential. Given Apple’s experience in introducing high-demand products, this seems unlikely. That leaves Scenario 2, which I think is actually a little worse. Both send a big “Thanks, suckers!” to early adopters, but Scenario 2 is just a little more evil.

Companies that are in trouble or have a stinker of a product—again, not Apple—act out Scenario 1 relatively frequently (see, for example, the TiVo Series3 mega-rebates that were going on for a while). Scenario 2, on the other hand, is more the domain of post-launch eBay gougers. For eBayers, perhaps “gouging” is too harsh—they’re providing products that are otherwise hard to come by for a price someone is willing to pay. Indeed, the eBay gouging scene is the perfect place to observe supply and demand. But is this how we want to think of Apple? Is it any fun to get high fives from eBay gougers?

I think that’s the biggest problem here. People like Apple, and people think Apple likes them. It’s one thing to bend over for an eBay gouger, because you know exactly who you’re dealing with. But Apple? Well, let’s just say that we thought we could expect a little better from them.

I’m posting this from the $400 phone that I bought for $600. I could have lived with a $50 price drop, but $200? Talk about screwing over your most loyal customers.

Weak, man. Weak.

I’ve never had much luck with these sorts of things, but I decided to give Installer.app for iPhone a try. People generally seem to be installing this thing without a hitch, and besides, iTunes meticulously backs up everything on your iPhone anyway.

What could go wrong?

Well, something did. The installer (“AppTapp”) printed something like “Waiting for pre-final reboot” to the console then fell silent. I stared blankly at the exclamation point on my iPhone for a few seconds, and after some panicked plugging- and replugging-in, iTunes stepped in and restored both my firmware and the most recent backup. The second go with AppTapp was unsuccessful, too, so I gave up and let iTunes at it again.

iTunes restored the firmware and asked if I wanted to recover from the backup. Sure, that’d be swell. This time around, though, it didn’t go so smoothly. iTunes spat out some lame error dialog—“A timeout occurred” or some other such nonsense—and then proceeded to sync my music. Here’s the kicker, though. You know that backup folder it meticulously creates? Well, it meticulously overwrote it with the nothingness on my freshly-restored phone. Settings, mail accounts, contact favorites, my grocery list—gone.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the end of the world. I was doing something I shouldn’t have been, and the worst possible outcome is that I may forget to buy milk tomorrow. But what’s the point of backups that aren’t reliable? And why-oh-why would you write software that destroys the backup when an error occurs during recovery? The mind boggles. Even if time constraints made it impossible to develop something more robust, if iTunes had just thrown the old data in a “Failed Backups” folder, I could’ve at least decoded it myself.

The worst part is that this all sounds vaguely familiar. Maybe these incidents are rare, and maybe it’s just because my daily reading skews so heavily towards the Mac-only, but this certainly seems to be a recurring theme for Apple.