From A Guy Walks Into an Apple Store by Matt Birchler
"This sounds like it will all work great, but now I have a new phone, two new cables, and one new charging brick, but I didn't get a charging brick with the iPhone because that was supposed to help reduce waste?" "You got it. Thanks for buying the things our ads say you should buy, and enjoy your new iPhone."
I mean, I get it. It is a convoluted set of steps to go from “new to iPhone” to “fully equipped with my iPhone”. I mean, it’s not crazy…
- Buy an iPhone.
- Buy a MagSafe charger/cable.
- Buy the new charging brick.
Seems fine. And if we’d never built the expectation that those would be freebies we find in the box, nobody would be the wiser.
The real underhanded trick Apple’s performed is, however, that this makes the iPhone $39 + $19 = $58 more expensive because the price of the phone itself didn’t change.
Oh, wait. As we all know, it actually did. If you’re not on AT&T or Verizon, the phone went up $30 too.
That means the iPhone price silently went up $88. I know I’m belaboring that a little with the previous post, but that’s not great.
In this one case, it really doesn’t feel Jobsian. He would always claim the products were worth the price. He wouldn’t play the shell game with $90.
Or have I forgotten something & I’m using memory’s rose colored glasses?
Do we already know if that’s the case for the iPhone 12 mini, or is there a chance they could reverse course at least for that non-Pro model?
Real-time update: The wacky $30 carrier-free surcharge is there for the mini:
