Jobs pulls an Oprah -- $12M in iPhones for all Apple employees
By Thomas Ricker 
posted June 28th 2007 3:44PM
posted June 28th 2007 3:44PM
posted June 28th 2007 3:44PM
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Bury me with my money....
Yeah, that's about 20,000 New AT&T 2yr. Contracts. I'm sure AT&T took part in this massive phone giveaway, because they'll be cashing in too (with the service).
Even if 95% of them will end up on ebay, the fact their on ebay means they will be sold and used, iReally don't get your point.
The one thing i don't understand is that people who don't like Apple products spend so much time and energy talking about them, from iPods to MACs to the iPhone about how much they hate them, but im sure you don't find any of us on spending ours debating about how garbage most of MS products are, we just know they are and move on with life and continue to love our Apple Branded Goodies.
And come on if Apple didn't make the best products they would not be industry standard tools for film makers,musicians and animators and your favorite actor and director would not love them either if they weren't the best.
Not to slam Apple for this (we all like free stuff, afterall...) but in this case the "gift" is really
1) $200 in out of pocket tax expenses (they will be taxed on the fair market value regarless of what it costs to produce)
2) $60 per month service fee for two years
which adds up to a $1640 EXPENSE for each employee!
Free like a pony.
its not like they went out and bought 12 mil worth of iPhones. its their product. they made it...so its special.
I would also assume Steve to ask these 12,000 people to submit bug's back to the iphone team. Makes a good beta-testing pool. Your own frickin' employees!
don't knock MS comic chat! Jerkcity http://www.jerkcity.com/ relies on it!
This would be a great way for Microsoft to. . . you know. . . start "the social".
They're not getting their free phones until the end of July as Ars Technica notes! That's one thing Engadget editors failed to point out...
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/06/28/internal-apple-stevenote-iphone-ipods-with-os-x-and-off-the-charts-macs-in-the-pipeline
@gian
You are an idiot beyond idiots.
You bring out a list of software failures (minus one) to compare it to hardware failures, and all (minus two) are small parts of an OS. Nice comparison you as*.
Secondly, you instantly attack Microsoft, first of all, assuming that the user who made the original comment is even a microsoft fan (linux exists, you sheep of sheeps), and second of all, falling into the same error that the original poster made which you attempted to be "cute" yourself and attempted to attack his post. Apple fans are quite the bright bunch.
Ill be directly honest, because i think its a stupid product. It will sell well, and it will most likely get that 10 million mark in sales this year. But there is one condition. It has to be lowered in price, and has to have some of its cost covered in a contract (like phones are handled today) for apple to even think of reaching that mark.
There are good things to come from this phone. Other makers will adopt its features, and expand the market of phones to include the iPhones features, as well as adding things that are actually useful to business users (the list is quite large).
Apple are masters of making people believe that everything they release to market is a “world first” or totally new and innovative. They are a brilliant brand savvy company, with absolutely beautiful looking products, no one can deny that, but sometimes I think they pull the wool over people’s eyes. I have Mac and a PC, and I always find myself yearning to be back on my Vista machine after a few hours of playing around with my Mac. Apple TV was released 5 years after Microsoft Media Center PC’s which do x10 times as much as the Apple TV does. XBOX 360 is a far more effective set top box, and it plays games also.
In terms of laptop innovation, products like the Tablet PC and UMPC’s kick the heck out of anything I have seen from Apple of late. So I think Microsoft is pretty dam innovative on a number of levels. They may not be as good at telling the story, but they ship some pretty cool stuff. They had the master stroke with the iPod, and frankly even this was not all that innovative. The only thing innovative about the iPod is the brilliance behind the business model that is iTunes. The reality is that MP3 players had been around for years before the iPod even existed. All this rambling brings me to the work of art that is the iPhone. It is very sexy, and I know that Apple will sell many of them, but here are the realities of the device….i will let you all figure out the rest:
Apple is good at making products that a majority of consumers will enjoy and use. They aren't innovative when it comes to features, but they do a very good job at the presentation of their products.
Microsoft puts out some feature rich applications that are really powerful, but they are very general purpose or overly complicated. having 1000 different options and configuration modes may make a geek drool, but all those sweet options will confuse a good portion novice technology users.
i have heard two different stories about this: one is that every fulltime employee and all part timers who have been there more than a year get one, two is that all employees who have been there more than a year get one. anyone know which one is right?
Lets not forget Steve Jobs is one of the most revered and intellectual CEO's in the world. He couldn't have been named a CEO without his incredible drive to succeed which only compliments his intelligence. In regards to the free 8gb iphone for all employess the concept is quite simple: Advertising.
Who better to promote your new, revolutionary product than your own employees? Now, we can automatically assume that employees of Apple have been buzzing about this thing for months on end. With the announcement of this gift and after the dust has cleared, up to 12,000 Apple employees will provide hours of priceless advertising. This will get the item into their lives and in turn will expose their friends and family to the product as well. They become salesman for not only Apple and its iphone but AT&T as well. At least for the near future, AT&T has an exclusive contract to the iphone and now that we've learned there is no way to unlock the device, it only solidifies that this may have been a part of the deal with AT&T and Apple. AT&T must have requested the phone to not have a swappable sim so that they could guarantee that every single iphone sold whether its on eBay, Apple or AT&T stores, online or some guy off the street,would eventually be required to be activated on their service for any kind of use including the ipod functionality.
This is an awesome gesture and I'm not seeking to challenge that concept. However, this is a win-win situation as the company will now use their own employees to get the iphone into use and hope that their employees will encounter enough people to further increase the hype of the units launch.
Looks like someone is afraid they aren't going to make their sales mark now that the lines aren't forming as anticipated.
Nice iPod (except for the tiny drive), shitty phone.
Jobs: Oh, and one more thing......Don't be surprised if there is a $600 deduction from your paycheck! Good day!
That's very nice of him, but you have to have been there for a year to get one? That's real nice... so if you've been there for say, nine or ten months or less, then you don't get one while EVERYONE around you does. Way to make the people who've been there less than a year feel ostracized, like lepers. Talk about a stupid way of doing things.
You can't discriminate with things like that. If you're going to bless your employees by giving out free phones company-wide, then you have to bless every last one of them. You can't do that and set qualifications. That would be idiotic - because then you just damage moral.
Apple's gonna make a billion bucks off this thing, so they can afford to give a phone to ALL employees - even if they've been at Apple for only a single day.
Um... What's the big deal? Is it unusual for a white-collar, technology oriented business to provide cell phones to employees?
Two years ago, my company provided Treos to all employees, at a real cost of about $300 a head.
I suspect that apple's actual(real) cost on those $600 retail iPhones is about $400,
So, just the cost of doing business.
AT&T has revoked its standard employee discount when purchasing the iPhone or any rate plan chosen for use with the iPhone.
Who do you want to work for?
This is a common practice in many companies. Why let your employees advertise that they use someone lessees products. Most manufacturers give their employees discounts on their consumer goods. Some companies go so far as to fire employees who use a competitor's products, even if it not them who bought it (i.e. a car company firing an executive for getting into a cab made by a competitor).
C'mon guys... an iPhone is going to cost $$'s at cost price, so in real terms, mass producing the 100's of millions of phones to his staff is nothing on the grand scheme of things..
Now that's some bullsh*t... and where's the AT&T employee's free iPhone? Those who work for the company didn't get one... don't even get a damn discount.
Steve doesn't have to pay $600 for an iPhone (it's marked up), so the $12 million number is off.
iUse iPhone for iPorn.