If you’re like us, it’s killing you that you don’t have an iPhone yet. That said, some of us Freelance-Zoners aren’t early adopters of ANYTHING, and until iPhone functionality improves more than a few of us will be waiting for another iteration of this wonderful gizmo before we invest any freelance dollars.
If you are an early adopter but haven’t picked one up yet, there’s an interesting report from TheStreet.com, where reporter Priya Ganapati speculates another fifty dollar price cut could be coming. According to Ganapati, Apple needs to boost demand for the iPhone, and could go as low as $299 if it really wanted to–but it doesn’t need to boost demand quite that much, so the higher price point is still in your future.
TheStreet.com video is interesting from a writing perspective because it indulges in one of my personal pet peeves–a news outlet interviewing one of its own reporters as a subject matter expert. I’ll give props to TheStreet for not dressing up this clip as anything more than pure speculation, which I can’t say of some of the major networks out there. Attention writers; if you want to speculate go ahead and do it. But do NOT follow the very bad examples of network news types who interview their own paid staffers and present them in ways that don’t tell the whole truth.
Pay attention the next time you see a reporter interviewed by one of their fellow reporters. You’ll notice that no special claims are made to insider knowledge, but by the same token the networks deliberately fail to point out what’s obvious to any professional in the industry–there’s no news happening here, this is reporter speculation only, not even so much as an anonymous tipster source to lend weight to the discussion. These interviews by omission have the potential to be quite misleading.
Getting back to Apple for a moment, I find it telling that they keep chopping away at the price of the iPhone. If that doesn’t send a clear message NOT to be an early adopter unless you have scads of cash floating around, I don’t know what does.
