Rumours were rampant earlier this week about Apple potentially coming to market with a low-cost iPhone that could possibly compete with Google’s entry-level Android devices. Both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg‘s sources indicated that we’ll finally see Apple launch an iPhone around the $150 mark by the end of 2013. Unfortunately, as expected, this dream has been shot down by Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide marketing.
Schiller stated in an interview with China’s Shanghai Evening News that “every product that Apple creates, we consider using only the best technology available. This includes the production pipeline, the Retina display, the unibody design, to provide the best product to the market. At first, non-smartphones were popular in the Chinese market, now cheap smartphones are more popular and non-smartphones are out. Despite the popularity of cheap smartphones, this will never be the future of Apple’s products. In fact, although Apple’s market share of smartphones is just about 20%, we own the 75% of the profit.”
Of course there’s a fine line of the definition of “cheap.” Apple does make products with quality parts to them. So possibly the $150 iPhone is out of reach, but not a $400 one. Apple recently released the iPad mini, which is a smaller version of the popular tablet with a 7.9-inch display and costs a couple hundred dollars less than previous 9.7-inch iPads. Anything is possible…
Source: TNW
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