“In the past, when we’ve announced a new iPhone, we’ve lowered the price of the current iPhone making it even more accessible to more people. But this year, we’re not going to do that,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company’s special event in Cupertino on Tuesday.
Instead, Apple replaced the iPhone 5 with the iPhone 5c, a device with exactly the same internals, but a different, more colorful design. But why did it do that? Could it be because the iPhone 5 is too similar to the iPhone 5s, and that dropping its price would have hurt sales of the newer model?
I think so.
I don’t think Apple made the iPhone 5c plastic to make it cheap; I think the company made it plastic to make it worse and to open up a bigger gap between the entry-level iPhone and the high-end model. Here’s why.