Speculation that Apple will unveil an inexpensive iPhone was revived Tuesday. RBC analyst Mark Abramsky expects Cupertino will unveil a $99 iPhone sometime this summer.
Abramsky, citing “checks”, told clients the handset is likely to eschew 3G, GPS and include a $15 data plan. A low-end iPhone could hike Apple’s share of the smartphone market to nearly 20 percent, according to one report.
While a $99 iPhone could mean handset sales for Apple, it could also cannibalize iPhone and iPod sales. The downshift might force Apple to sell triple the number of iPhones to take up the slack, according to Abramsky.
Long noted for its high-margin products, a less expensive iPhone could shrink margins for the touch-screen handset to around 37 percent from over 50 percent next year, according to the analyst.
The June or July release date expectation appears to dovetail with a report earlier this month. A new Apple handset “is due out in June,” United Arab Emirates’ carrier Etisalat told a local business publication.
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.
