Editorial
How Humiliating
I suppose I won’t be taking any monetary advice from Brett Arends. In his piece for the Wall Street Journal titled “When It Comes to the iPhone, Waiting Was Golden” he makes the case that only fools went out and bought the first generation iPhone. From the article:
So much for all those who stood in line a year ago. They paid $599 (again, plus cellular contract) for a model with eight gigabytes of memory, and those models only ran on slower EDGE networks.
How humiliating is that? Owning one of these is like being the PC guy in a Mac commercial.
Clearly, Mr. Arends hasn’t done any actual math on this subject. He simply says that an early adopter paid $599 for an 8GB model and someone who waited will pay $199 for an 8GB model with 3G and GPS. That certainly seems cut and dry. But we’re talking R.O.I. here, right? That’s the lead on this story, in fact it’s part of the page title. And if we’re talking R.O.I. then we must talk about total cost of ownership. And in the end, you will pay more for an iPhone 3G than I did for my iPhone 2G. Here’s how it breaks down:
I stood in line on June 27, 2007 for the first generation iPhone.
- $599 for 8GB iPhone
- $480 for 24 months @ $20/month Unlimited Data Plan (including 200 SMS)
- $1200 for 24 months @ $50/month voice plan
- -$100 credit when Apple dropped the price to $399
- TOTAL $2179 for 24 months of ownership
The new iPhone 3G will be released on July 11, 2008 with new data plans
- $199 for 8GB iPhone (with 3G and GPS, $299 for 16GB)
- $720 for 24 months @ $30/month Unlimited Data Plan
- $119.76 for 24 months @ $4.99/month 200 SMS Plan
- $1200 for 24 months @ $50/month voice plan
- TOTAL $2238.76 for 24 months of ownership
Note: I include the $4.99 for SMS because that’s what iPhone 2G users get included with their data plan at $20 a month. You could choose to pay 10 cents per message sent or received for SMS but that would not be a true comparison of features. Also, this does not take into account taxes and regulatory fees which increase with your total bill.
Humiliating indeed. The way I see this is that I enjoyed a superior product for a year before the “waiters” are going to get a chance to experience the same product. They’ll pay $60 more than me to experience the product but they’ll get 3G and GPS. Every other new feature is in the software and I get that as a free upgrade. I don’t think there’s anything humiliating about enjoying the world’s best phone for a year and paying less than other people are about to.
The true winners here are people who just bought an iPhone in the last month or two. They only paid $399 for their iPhone and they enjoy the same contract as the day-one iPhone buyers. But their contract gets to stretch into 2010. They’ll enjoy a much better R.O.I.
Music Subscriptions Feel So Wrong
I rent movies because I might watch them once. Maybe twice. I have about 40 DVDs of movies I know I’ll watch more than a few times. The way I consume movies is much different than the way I consume music so renting or subscribing to Netflix makes sense. Music matters to me. I have over 5000 tracks in iTunes, most of which are from my CD collection, and all of that music matters. The very idea of being able to listen to all the music ever made in exchange for a subscription sounds ridiculous. There’s only so much music a person can enjoy. And if you are the type of person that needs to hear the latest and greatest song by whatever hot teen the labels are pimping then you aren’t the kind of person that really likes music. You like synthetic garbage.
So I hope that this plan the Financial Times is reporting isn’t a mandatory thing. I hope they keep pushing for more songs to be in the non-DRM iTunes Plus format for purchase. I don’t ever want my music hijacked by a company because I don’t want to pay the monthly extortion for their subscription anymore.
UPDATED: 3/24/07: According to CNet, sources say it’s Universal who is putting this on the table. I seriously should have know that, after all Doug Morris would love nothing more than to put his hand in every music buyer’s pocket every month for the rest of their lives. Here’s my favorite quote:
“These guys at Universal,” said one music insider, “are so obsessed with this subscription thing…but there are publishing issues involved with bundling and I don’t think they make much money off it.”
The Unused Forward Button
I was watching a video of the new gestures for the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pros and noticed that they are touting the ability to swipe from right-to-left to go “back” in a browser or go left-to-right to go “forward” in the browser. And that got me thinking, have I ever used the forward button? I started to think back on all the years I’ve used web browsers from Netscape to IE to Firefox to Safari and I can’t remember a time when I ever even thought to use the forward button. And that got me thinking about the behavior of other people and whether or not they use the forward button. If people do find that button useful, how do they use it? And what percentage of web users find the forward button useful? I’m very curious about this because ever since the introduction of tabbed browsing I barely even use the back button.
Do you use the forward button? How do you use it?
Janus Gives Big
I had a choice to make when I took my job at Janus Capital Group (Janus). I had another offer from Newsgator and I was excited about Newsgator’s potential. In fact, I really wanted to work for Newsgator ever since I found out they were based in Denver. My interview went well and I liked everyone I spoke to at Newsgator. I was taken by surprise when I got a call from Janus and they thought I was a good match for their web designer position. I took the interview because I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned and the interview went as well as any I’ve ever had in my life. There was something about the place that felt right to me and in the end, with all factors being pretty much equal, I decided to go with Janus because of the way the place felt to me.
So I’m proud to see that Janus gave Denver Public Schools their largest-ever corporate gift of $3 million dollars. It illustrates that “feeling” I got from the place, like it’s more than just a job.
The Then-Than Epidemic
I have quite a few friends that have trouble with then and than. They’ll say things like “I’m better then you at football” or “it was more then I expected.” I always shrugged it off as a quick typo, thinking ahead of your typing. But after reading a respectable online news publication this morning, I believe this problem is bigger then I suspected.
From IHT.com:
“More then 1 in 100 American adults is in prison, report finds”
And that’s the headline. In case they fix it, I’ve included a screen grab.
