Taking inflation into account, a $599 iPhone in 2026 would have been $380 in 2007. Given that the actual launch price in 2007 was $499, that's a pretty hefty drop.
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.
I’m pretty sure they determine the price upfront and then figure out what bells and whistles they can ship without eating into their margins. Their goal is to hit a certain average selling price across their massive user base when they upgrade their old phones. They are not going to jeopardize that by releasing an attractive cheap iPhone.
For the people who really don’t want to spend a lot, obviously the easiest option is to just buy an older iPhone or keep your phone for longer. My partner doesn’t care about having the latest tech. So first I use a phone for 3 years and then they use it for another 3 years. We essentially get 6 years of life out of it (Apple is good about releasing software updates for 6 years).
No, Mercedes Benz is definitely a luxury brand. They don’t want to sell to everyone. Apple (Steve Jobs) has explicitly stated that as one of their goals.
> It’s not a luxury brand, it is a quality brand. There is a difference.
It’s an attainable luxury brand. There aren’t many products that a high school kid has in common with billionaires, superstar athletes and movie stars—the iPhone is such a product.
I'd argue that is worth the money if you're going to be using a phone every single day of their life. People will drop a few hundred on fancy shoes and wear them once a month, but they treat phones as cheap commodities.
Agreed, but its more the fact that you get a lot more peace of mind tossing around, and otherwise treating without too much care, a cheaper device. Risk of drops, theft, forgetting etc. are pretty high for something that I use every day. But then I'm a broke PhD student, so perhaps my views will change one day.
Last time I complained about the pricing of the iPhone, people pointed out that inflation included the prices wasn't to far of from the original iPhone.
Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
The prices are, in my mind insane, and I'll be buying used, but those are also overpriced.
> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.
This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.
Accounting for inflation, that's $542. And considering how much everything, including phones, costs nowadays, $600 seems like a steal to me too. I was expecting a much higher price for what I'm seeing on that page.
