iPhone Pricing

After a little more than a week of waiting, Apple posted details today about how early iPhone owners can go about landing their $100 Apple Store credit.

Straight from the horse's mouth, here is who qualifies:

If you bought your iPhone before August 22, you may be eligible for an instant $100 electronic credit toward the purchase of products at the Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.

(If you purchased after August 22nd, you can recover the entire $200 difference through Apple's price protection plan.)

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the recent $200 price drop of the Apple iPhone. The news, which came out of Apple's September 5th media event, was followed by an intense reaction from early adopters who were upset at the financial impact of a price reduction so shortly after the iPhone's release.

After Apple received countless complaints about the monetary penalty being suffered by early adopters, Apple and Steve Jobs decided to retract their initial response to customer complaints and instead are planning to offer all individuals who purchased the iPhone prior to the price reduction a $100 credit spendable at the Apple Store.

While this credit from Apple will allow early adopters to recover 50% of the $200 price difference, it seems there may be a way for iPhone owners to recover 100% of the price cut. Those of you who

When Steve Jobs announced, at the September 5th Apple media event, that Apple was cutting $200 off the price of the iPhone, many a cheer was heard across the US. However, almost as resounding were the jeers of early iPhone adopters who had essentially paid $200 for the privilege of owning an iPhone for two months or less.

Though penalizing early adopters financially isn't a foreign concept to Apple, and is in fact a reality that many Mac faithfuls accept, the magnitude of this scenario exceeded anything seen before by Apple customers. As a result, countless emails and complaints were reportedly received by Apple by customers who had purchased the iPhone previous to the price reduction.

In an open letter, published on the Apple website, Steve Jobs has offered an apology to the community. In the letter, he states

After some technical difficulties yesterday, we're back online and are going to endeavor to update readers throughout the day on some of the more interesting items that came out of yesterday's Apple media event.

We'll start with the price slashing Apple announced to close the media event (yes, sort of backwards, but so be it).

Jobs announced that Apple would be discontinuing the production of 4GB iPhone models. Though not particularly surprising, this may have seemed daunting to those who wanted to get their hands on an iPhone without paying $599.