Contrary to yesterday’s rumors, a new analyst report suggests that the iPhone 3GS will remain the low-end iPhone even after the iPhone 5 drops in September… making it the first iPhone to spend over three years on the market.
“In other words, we believe that the [existing] 3GS will be the low-end iPhone,” BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman writes Tuesday. Monday, Deutshe Bank’s Chris Whitmore told investors a low-end iPhone 4S that was unlocked and pre-paid could help Apple “aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market” as RIM and Nokia are on life-support.
Bachman’s comments appear to bring some sanity back into the discussion. As we intimated Monday, the idea of releasing the iPhone 4S as a $350 unlocked phone just didn’t make sense when Apple is currently selling the unlocked iPhone 4 for nearly $700 each. Still, it’s interesting that the hardware price on the iPhone 4 has yet to come down enough to make it worth Apple selling at a lower price. You can probably thank the Retina Display for that.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
