Steve Jobs blinks

Remember this day, friends, because you probably won’t come across another one like it for quite a while. It's the day when the always-right chairman of Apple admitted that he was wrong. He didn't quite put it that way in the open letter he posted on the company's Web site. Notably, he waited until the last paragraph to apologize for his knuckleheaded move of chopping the price of an iPhone by $200 - and in the process ticking off a good number of suckers, er, customers who spent hours waiting in line for the very expensive toy. You can almost imagine Jobs gritting his teeth as he launched into a whirlwind of excuses before getting down to the apology.

Being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon. The good news is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, like Apple tries to do, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service from them even as newer models are introduced.

Then he grudgingly gets into how Apple needs to do right by the early iPhone customers. So out of the goodness of his billionaire heart, he's offering a $100 credit to the poor schlubs who bought an iPhone for $599. What a guy! What a company! But wait a second, the phone has been discounted to $399. Why not a $200 credit? Hmmm. Somehow that doesn't come up in the letter. It is worth noting that Apple’s contrition comes after almost 24 hours of griping about the price cut - not to mention a sharp drop in the stock price (it's recovered in the last few hours). Here's the letter and here's an early Bloomberg story.