Apple has given in to pressure from iPhone owners complaining about the $200 (£99) price cut to the device made on Wednesday. US shoppers who bought the iPhone in the last 14 days will be eligible for a full refund or credit, as is Apple’s standard policy. However owners of iPhones bought before that will be given a $100 (£50) Apple Store voucher in compensation.
Steve Jobs posted a letter on the Apple website saying “Even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price.”
Jobs said customers who bought an iPhone - a combination cellphone, music player and Web browser - and didn’t receive a rebate would be eligible for a $100 store credit toward the purchase of any product at an Apple retail outlet or at its online store.
He maintained that price cuts are part of life in the consumer technology world. “There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cut-off date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever,” Jobs explained. “This is life in the technology lane.”
In an interview with USA Today, Jobs was asked if he wanted to apologise to those that had bought an Apple iPhone for $599 (£296), before the price drop was announced. “That’s technology,” Jobs said. “If they bought [the Apple iPhone] this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that’s what happens in technology.”
“It sucks,” said Albany resident Matt Baumgartner, who has an Apple logo affixed to the back of his car. “But if they had told me then they were going to drop the price in a few months, I still would have bought it.
“I was obsessed with it.”
Details of the $100 Apple Store vouchers are still being confirmed, Jobs wrote, but will be posted on the Apple website during the coming week.