Cheaper iPhones? Don’t bet on it, says Apple exec

Apple exec Greg Joswiak at the Code/Mobile conference. Photo: TechCrunch

Particularly as Apple extends its tentacles overseas into new markets like China and India, many pundits have suggested that Cupertino needs to make low-cost iPhones to compete with lower-end Android devices.

So will it? According to Apple’s product marketing executive Greg Joswiak the answer is a resounding, emphatic “hell no!”

Speaking about pricing and market share with Walt Mossberg and Ina Fried at Re/code‘s Code/Mobile conference, Joswiak described some of the mistakes Apple made back in the dark days of the 1990s, when he first arrived at Apple, working his way up to PowerBook product manager.
“[S]ome of it was trying to do things like making cheap products that were chasing market share instead of chasing a better experience,” he told Mossberg and Friend. “You make that mistake once in your life, you’re not going to make it twice.”
Today, Joswiak says Apple’s ambition is different, and certainly more refined:

“Our goal is to make the best products with the best experience. And we’re trying to make sure that we are delivering on that, and by and large we do. Our customer satisfaction rate is higher than anybody’s. We have no shortage of either developers or customers … maybe it is naïve, but we [believe] that if we make a better product and a better experience, that there will always be a healthy market for that. And a healthy market doesn’t mean we have to be market-share leader.”

Certainly, with Apple going from strength-to-strength in developing markets, while lower-end manufacturers struggle, it’s difficult to think Apple’s made the wrong decision. Even if it does mean we have to shell out a bit more money for our iPhones.