Price is certainly not a factor for the first set of buyers. Apple has relatively modest targets of selling 10M iphones next year and should easily achieve that. For a product like this there will always be a bunch of "must have" people. It makes sense to target these people with the first roll-out.
The iphone is being released with only a small % of its potential feature set. There's scope to add 3 party apps and many other feature.
No doubt there will be follow-on products that are lower cost, higher volume, and released to a wider group of carriers.
Think ipod->ipod mini->ipod nano. I'd never buy a hard disk ipod, but I would buy a (second) nano.
There's scope to take iphone in so many different directions both up-feature and down-feature.
In the long term the limiting factor for phone integration is usability. Apple knows a thing or two about that! That's why ipod is so much easier to use than many competing devices with far more features.
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Re: Price not a factor
Price is certainly not a factor for the first set of buyers. Apple has relatively modest targets of selling 10M iphones next year and should easily achieve that. For a product like this there will always be a bunch of "must have" people. It makes sense to target these people with the first roll-out.
The iphone is being released with only a small % of its potential feature set. There's scope to add 3 party apps and many other feature.
No doubt there will be follow-on products that are lower cost, higher volume, and released to a wider group of carriers.
Think ipod->ipod mini->ipod nano. I'd never buy a hard disk ipod, but I would buy a (second) nano.
There's scope to take iphone in so many different directions both up-feature and down-feature.
In the long term the limiting factor for phone integration is usability. Apple knows a thing or two about that! That's why ipod is so much easier to use than many competing devices with far more features.