Apple has dismissed critics who claim that $499 is too much for a mobile phone, reports The Seattle Times. The argument appears to be that people don’t pay a lot of money for mobile handsets because those handsets are worthless, and doesn’t want to compare the iPhone to others in a similar price range: “That kind of analysis doesn’t make really great products...The iPod would not have been brought to market if we would have looked at it that way — how many $399 music players were being sold at that time?” As such, it expects 10 million people to pay $499 for the phone next year.
The iPhone may sell well, even at a higher price point, but when Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook comes out and says something like “if we offer something that has tremendous value, that is sort of this thing people didn’t have in their consciousness—it was not imaginable” then it sounds like someone’s been spiking the Kool Aid.
On the carrier side, AT&T Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner said that up to 75 percent of people buying the iPhone will be first-time subscribers to AT&T‘s mobile service…