Amaya Toman Among other things, Apple is famous for always trying to carefully consider every step it is about to take. Its management also often lets itself be heard that it cares a lot about customers and their opinions, which is why the Cupertino company is also carefully building its PR. However, it is not always successful in this direction. An example can be when Apple decided to radically reduce the price of the first iPhone not long after it went on sale.
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The launch of the first-ever iPhone was a big and significant event for both Apple and its customers. A lot of dedicated Apple fans did not hesitate to invest a lot of money in the first smartphone from the workshop of the Cupertino company. But to their great surprise, Apple significantly discounted its first iPhone just a few months after its launch.
At that time, the subject of the mentioned discount was the model with 8GB of storage, while Apple said goodbye to the 4GB version of its first iPhone for good at the time, and also reduced the price of the remaining stock of this variant, which dropped to $299 after the discount. The price of the 8GB variant dropped by two hundred dollars – from the original 599 to 399 – which is certainly not an insignificant discount. Of course, customers who had hesitated to buy an iPhone until then were excited, while users who bought an iPhone immediately after it went on sale were understandably dissatisfied. Of course, the proper response to this dubious PR move did not take long.
A non-negligible part of the users who bought the first iPhone right from the start were die-hard Apple fans who supported their favorite company, for example, even during the absence of Steve Jobs, when it was not doing very well. In addition to these customers, various analysts began to voice that the price cut of the first iPhone could indicate that its sales were not developing as Apple had originally expected - a speculation that was ultimately proved to be misguided when Apple boasted of one million iPhones sold.
When Apple's management noticed the uproar the discount had caused among some customers, they decided to immediately correct their PR blunder. In response to hundreds of e-mails from enraged fans, Steve Jobs offered a $100 credit to anyone who bought the first iPhone at original price. Although this move did not match the full amount of the discount, Apple at least improved its reputation a little.
