Any Apple afficionados eagerly anticipating a holiday bargain had better start saving instead – experts agree that a price war isn’t on the cards this Christmas after all. The arena of iPhone rights might have been a pool of hungry sharks recently, with Orange and Vodafone rushing in to snap the smartphone out from under O2 when Apple offered it, but it looks like they won’t be trying to cut the cost to steal marketshare.
You might be used to ignoring “experts” (after all, every newspaper seems to have plenty of the things), but when one is the chief executive of Carphone Warehouse you have to admit he probably knows what he’s doing. It seems the idea of loss-leading lacks appeal for the new iPhone-owners – after all, what’s the point of paying through the nose to get the thing if you’re effectively paying more every time you sell one?
In one way this is actually a positive development. Instead of unscrupulously offering “cheap” phones which come with crippling contracts, it seems the three providers understand that it’ll really be a battle of data plans. With the iPhone acting as a mobile computer (and over two billion app downloads to date), it’s not a question of who can sell them (any more) but who can keep them connected and up to date.
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