Quote:
Originally Posted by pscates2.0
But between the no-discount pricing (you pay the full $499 or $599 price, regardless of any contracts you sign) and this "forced-on you, needlessly expensive"
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Those prices ($499 and $599)
are discounted. If you
could buy one without a 2-year contract, you can bet that it would cost a lot more.
I
really think this is why we have no info about the plan(s) yet. They haven't figured it out. Or, more likely, they haven't finalized it.
It's very complicated for them. They need to figure out what they actually need to charge for the phone - the amount they need to get from the customer, including contract kick-back or whatever you want to call that, subtract the upfront, retail price ($499 or $599) then amortize the result over the contract length(s) and figure out what services to provide each month based on that monthly cost to the customer.
All that, while also considering that the monthly fee must seem "worth the price", relative to other phones and services you can get. And keep in mind that AT&T/Cingular aren't just going to stop selling everything else they have. They aren't going to exclusively sell iPhones, so they need for this sweet spot of pricing to work with all their other phones and services as well.
The one concrete, already-announced bit of data, the retail prices ($499 and $599), may have come to early and now their having a tough time working out the rest of the numbers.