Quit drooling, fanbois - haven't you SEEN what the iPhone 6 costs?

0% finance over the contract term

This is what I do - I'm paying my handset off over 2 years, 10 pounds a month, plus I pay 12 pounds a month for my SIM package, voice/data/txt - the £12 would be same for any handset. If I don't want to replace the handset in 6 months when my contract is up I can go onto SIM only.

But this is why I have a nice little Samsung S3 Mini and not an i-whatever as the i-whatevers were all 40 or more pounds a month.

O2 Refresh

Sounds like this.

Okay, the price of the handset is tucked away in tiny letters on the "Sign away your life!" page and interestingly, the total price you pay each month doesn't seem to vary (seems to be roughly £33 for everything with a decent data allowance) but you can still see exactly how much the handset costs and it's a lot.

Not quite Expensys prices but pretty close.

How is the iPhone any different from any other top-end mobile phone? They all pretty much cost the same if bought outright and the contracts are just as expensive if bought on a contract.

they've managed to get us to pay premium prices

more "them" (...) than "us"

Well, various priced-stunningly-close-to-cost eastern phones have been trickling into western markets for a while now, many of them boasting hardware that is not appreciably behind anything traditional, brand-name mid- and high-range ones have to offer. I'm not sure die-hard Apple fans will be swayed by any of that, but it seems to me that a lot of people are really starting to wonder why they should pay "x" hundred Euro for a phone that can easily be had (sans the brand) for a quarter or third of that...

I have an iPhone which I paid full rate for with no contract. It worked out fractionally cheaper over two years, with the big advantage of no operator lock-in.

But it's amazing how many iPhone owners express shock when they found out how much I paid, even though they paid the same amount themselves. Because the price they paid was hidden and they allowed themselves to be fooled.

Price psychology is such an important part of this market.

Err...

Isn't it pretty much exactly the same price the 5S was?

The Reg 'we don't get invited to Apple events so we'll bash them at every opportunity' is really getting a bit fucking dull now. Have you considered growing up? As stated above, the products cost about the same as other 'comparable' items yet there aren't a plethora of articles baiting those.

If you don't want it, or can't afford it, it's quite simple - don't buy it. However, based on the sales of them thus far and the pre-orders this no doubt will have, i'd wager few people are that bothered and will buy it if they want it.

At first, I'd thought this might be a sensible article.

...but then I got to the line "£10 a month to finance a Nokia, £15 a month to finance a Samsung and £20 for an iGabbler" and realised that this was just another AppleHate article, as I'm pretty sure that the author, if he can remember Nokia and Samsung properly, hadn't forgotten either Apple or iPhone by that point and substituted with "iGabbler" thus, proudly, showing the bias from which this article was written.

I can't afford an iPhone

But my employer can.

Glad I'm not paying though.

I'm writing this before the great unveil and you'll be reading it afterwards

Great journalism then.

But it's cheaper....

The new iPhone 6, is actually cheaper than the iPhone 5 cost.

the iPhone 6 costs £539

the iPhone 5s cost £549 (last week)

This is what makes the tablet market interesting

Notice how the tablet market has eased off, but the smartphone market not so much? OK there's more than one reason for that. Many people in the developing world have gone phone, smartphone, and never detoured via PC or laptop. They won't be going into tablet, and continuing the growth. At least not for a long while.

Another reason is upgrade lifetime. You used to be forced to upgrade your PC when it stopped running anything you needed. But my iPad 3 can do almost anything that the iPad Air can do. Although the Air is lighter, and I want one. But discipline is so far holding. The upgrade from an original iPad was worth it for the better screen. I still see mine every-so-often in use by the person I sold it to for £50. So it would still have been working perfectly fine, had I kept it. The same seems to be true in Android land. The first generation of tablets were lacking in screen and power. Since the Android 4 ones, the rate of improvement stalled. So why not stick to what you've got?

Phones do get damaged more often. But otherwise the upgrades don't seem to be going so fast any more. I'd suspect a Samsung Galaxy 2 is not that much worse than a G4. Or are we up to 5 now? However, seeing as the upgrade is "free" after 2 years, why not stay on the same contract and take it?

The funny thing is, Samsung's tablets are almost half the price of its mobiles. And yet the most expensive bit is the screen, and the tablet one is 3 times the size of the phone one. Everything else is roughly the same parts, except the bigger battery. The iPad Air starts at £150 less than the iPhone. Even the one with the massively overpriced mobile chip is cheaper.

When there was no competition it still made some sense. But you can have a really nice Lumia for £250, or a still quite nice one for £120. Or a Motorola G. I wonder if Google will bother with another Nexus phone now?

uninvited

no wonder apple never invites The Register for their events, What's the point in inviting trolls who hate apple so much, all of their headlines for today are about apple. bashing bashing bashing.

Why don't you guys learn from Bill Ray's 2006 article. - http://goo.gl/BFeBDJ

This site used to be funny but that was over 10 years ago. now it is a total joke.

Apple Finance?

If this becomes a problem, Apple could finance the purchases itself. Why not? They have essentially unlimited cash, have only a third of the purchase price tied up as their cost, and the ability to brick it if you stop making payments. Much simpler and cheaper than car companies having to send out repo men or banks having to go through foreclosure when one fails to make their mortgage payments.

I'm actually surprised a bit they don't already do this, since there are many places where carrier subsidies have never existed. I suppose that with all the different laws that would affect them over the world they haven't seen it as worth the hassle yet.

I agree in general with the article

And I'd have to further ask what value you place on the years of free highly positive front pages and tv news articles delivered by the mainstream media?

It's advertising you literally couldn't buy and it's been a huge boost for Apple. This also seems to have tailed off since Steve Jobs' death (the media loves a narrative to build their myths on) and if that continues in the same direction it also has to have an effect on those margins.

Can Apple remain Apple without the myths built around them?

I really don't know why it's so complicated.

I have a Nexus 4 and a £7 a month tariff.

400 mins, 2000 texts and 500MB of data. I reckon that would do for most here other than the 14 year old girls and Netflix addicts.

I have an iPhone 4S that I bought outright for £499 when they first came out just under 3 years ago. It's still receiving software updates and will continue to do for the next year (it is supported by iOS 8). After that I will have had it for 4 years and it will still be worth about £50.

The amortisation over the period that there is software support for it, therefore, is about £112/yr. Some are better than others, but some combinations of manufacturer and operator will release no software updates for Android phones at all.

it's a prestige product. It sells BECAUSE it's expensive.

iPhones are like Louis Vuitton or Philippe Patek watches: you don't buy it because it's the best product, you buy it because it looks good and shows off your wealth.

iPhones MUST be more expensive than other phones: it's their main selling point. Making them bigger so they're more visible also makes sense, as it improves the show-off factor. The one thing Apple must never do, is sell a cheap iPhone.

The next step for Apple to cement its place in the exceedingly profitable prestige product niche would be to produce limited edition iPhones designed by famous artists (Damien Hirst, Banksy...), and/or made from exotic materials such as white gold.

"The mobile operator then hopes to make back that subsidy over the life of the contract."

Not in the UK anymore AFAIK. They now charge for the phone on a separate finance package (either interest free or with interest, but still assumed they get a discount so make money off it somehow).

This is for a couple of reasons I guess. We buy, rent or finance. Everything else gets messy, or is less than honest on the details. The old way is also unsustainable as customers get wise, buy your phone for £50 on contract, then don't use it, or use another company (sim car or VOIP etc) to avoid the companies charges and it never makes it's money back.

End of Contract In Sight - At Last?

While the carriers provided bundled contracts where the mobile service was joined with a phone there was some argument for fixed term contracts. These contracts started off at a not unreasonable 12 months then crept up to 18 and now the norm is 24. If as TechnicalBen says these bundled contracts are fast disappearing then everything changes.

Firstly, why buy your phone from a carrier? Other retailers have significantly more massive operations and should be able to offer better terms. I don't see how relatively tiny Carphone Warehouse, for example, can compete with Amazon or Best Buy and the like.

Secondly, why have a contract at all? If all you have is the mobile service having bought your handset elsewhere - which is what wise shoppers have been doing for a long, long time - then surely there is no need for a contract and definitely no need for a 24 month agreement.

But regularly observing items on eBay priced above what they can bought for in John Lewis's (other stores are available) I'm not sure that the rational consumer beloved of economist's - and price theorists - truly exists.

You can pay for anything you want

Apple never really came up with anything. You can get any gear you want - if you are prepared to pay for it. You always could.

The iPod was a perfect example of Jobbie's marketing insan... genius. Take an mp3 player, moronise the interface (and call it 'funky'), then add an 80G surface-mount spinner. Isn't this wonderful? And it only costs you $800! Just don't drop it.

The MacBook Air - we'll make it so thin that nobody can make a DVD-ROM drive for it... cos, you know, those things are like so dead, man. And they did die, true. About 5 years later. But then there's a little thing called heat-dissipation, but thats ok nobody cares about that. In the meantime, we are so sorry about your scorched testicles, Sir, but they were scorched by Steve so you really should be grateful. Give us $4500 for the new one with less Ball-Scorch....

Decades ago, in the luggable era, Hewlett Packard (I *think*, it may have been somebody else) made a luggable that you could throw over a wall onto concrete. They built it for the military, and it was one of the first devices with 'drop-sensing' that would park the spinner, and all the internals were gel-packed. It cost $30k.

Anything you want. Gimme yo dolla.