Oh, boo Apple.
Steve Jobs this morning announced that ringtones will shortly be available for iPhone. But here’s the rub: one must spend 99¢ for a song on the iTunes store, then to get a ringtone one must spend an additional 99¢ — that’s double the price — for a 30-second snippet of the same song.
This is, frankly, highway robbery of the same sort that’s been plaguing the ringtone industry, an industry that seems to think that people should pay $3.99 for a 30-second portion of a song. At that kind of inflationary rate, a 40-minute CD of music would cost $319.
Even at Apple’s price, that CD would cost $79.
I’m sorry, but this is patently insane and I — the big Apple fan that I am — will never buy a ringtone from them.
Update: I’m pretty disappointed that so far, all of the new features Steve Jobs has introduced involve me spending more money. They’re all new ways to buy things with my iPhone, from ringtones to iTunes Music Store to purchasing music at Starbucks. (They very kindly give iPhone/iPod users “free” WiFi at Starbucks… but only to buy music.) Where’s the everyday features that have been missing from iPhone, like to-do lists? I’ve already given Apple so many thousands of dollars, and $600 + service charges just for the iPhone. Now they’re just nickel and diming me to death and filling up my iPhone with buttons to send my wallet to Apple.
Update: The ultimate pissing off of long-term customers: they just dropped the price of iPhone by $200. Two months after I purchased one for $600. Apple is not winning my loyalty today. I’m pretty damned pissed off. $50? $100? I would have grinned and beared it. But 1/3 of the price just two months later? Explain to me now why anyone would want to buy a new, untested Apple product when it is first introduced now? Aren’t the early adopters key to Apple’s innovation, providing a ready customer base for new products…
Well, well, well… I posted about my own disappointment with today’s announcement, concerning the maximum 16Gb capacity of the new iPod Touch, for $50 more than the new 160Gb iPod Classic. My love affair with Apple soured years ago, though I kept thinking they might just woo me back, only to be fairly continually disppointed. But I never, never expected to see you start to back away from the Apple teat.
I keep telling you, that Steve Jobs is no good for you, man. He just keeps stringing you along, extracting more than he gives, sapping your self-respect, always leaving you crying and wanting more. Dump him, man. He’s not worth it. You deserve better.
Aw Gene, don’t be so bitter. You yourself admit that it is dangerous to be an early adopter. I, on the other hand, was consdering the iPhone Touch when I read about the price drop.
BTW the Starbucks thing is just silly and a little weird to me; and so are ringtones; I made my own ringtone using a Legend of Zelda theme for my Razr and it cost me nothing… use your imagination and a free 3rd party sound editor! Only lazy people (and there are many) will spend the 99¢ I just don’t understand this whole need for a bazillion ringtones; where I used to work a couple people had a different one every day, and it was so freakin’ annoying…
Anyway, the $200 price drop was a shocker even to me… but it is making me consider… just consider… buying an iPhone, even though I almost never use my phone… cause I can text and soon it will have ichat. (btw, I don’t feel bad for you Gene, but I feel bad for a friend who bought the 8gb iPhone last week).
Hey, Microsoft just dropped the price of the Zune too!
And Thom, I wasn’t happy with that capacity at first, though it took me a second to realize that 16 gb is more than half of my 30 gb ipod video, and that is using a hard drive; the ipod is using (I assume) all flash memory. And my ipod is barely half full. That’s not bad really. I WOULD like a 16 gb iphone (look for that in a few months…) And come on, Gene has had one of those love/hate relationships with Apple for awhile. Steve is Blake Carrington, Gene is Alexis… bitter, but he still wants Blake…
You kids are so demanding! No one makes you buy this crap. Look at the ‘competition’: the poop colored zune, and a few other questionable devices. Imagine where we would be without Apple: crappy phones with crippled features and ‘web’ access controlled by the evil phone companies.
Tsk. Get over it. How about the thousands of dollars in taxes we pay against our will every year (and the lives lost) for Bush’s war? That’s something to get mad about.