Apple gives on Friday an announcement about the known iPhone 4 issue. Which is almost coming too late. Even if only a few people have an issue with latest iPhone it still had too much bad press in the last 4 weeks. It did influence even the stock price, Apple did go over $20 down in the last few weeks, and if they don't react right it could harm them much more. Toyota went big in trouble when the problem with the gas pedal came up. Again only a few people were affected but the press was so bad that Toyota had to react and spent millions to clean their image.
But what will Apple announce? That they will recall 3 Million iPhones? Would this delay all pending orders of iPhones? The iPhone is not for everybody so much better that they want to wait much longer. Will Apple lose customers?
Or is Apple offering everybody a free bumper case? But do the people who already bought a bumper case get reimbursed? What is with the people who bought a case from a 3rd party, do they get reimbursed as well?
Maybe Apple will reduce the iphone price by $40 (same price as a good case), or maybe everybody who bought an iPhone gets an Apple credit of $50? Will Apple extend the return warranty to 2 months till new fixed iPhones are coming out?
The least Apple should do, is to play the problem down or to come up with some weird excuse.
I think, Steve Jobs personally should do the announcement (which is unlikely, he prefers to announce good things). And he should offer all iPhone 4 users the possibility to either replace the iPhone, get a free bumper case or to take a $50 iTunes store credit card (I recently got from Nissan a $50 gift card because of a recall which would cost me $30 to adjust the brake pedal. Nissan claims it is not necessary to fix the problem but if i want to, I can use the gift card for it. I could even use the card for anything I want).
At the same time, Steve Jobs should announce that they fixed the issue in the hardware and all new shipped IPhones (starting in August) will not have this issue for left-handed people anymore.
He should as well apologize for waiting so long to announce something. He might say they waited till they found a solution.
But how much did this problem hurt Apple? If they recall all IPhones 4 then the direct costs would be over 1.5 Billion plus 3 Billion in stock lost.
But not only this, the competition, TV comedians, news and blogs are making fun of this, and bad news are not always better than no news. Apple is good consulted if they take the problem serious but at the same time make counter ads with fun of themselves. I remember back in the 70s we had in Germany a Citroen called 2CV. It was a very cheap car and everybody made jokes about the quality and that the best part would be the horn. Citroen reacted and all ads of their 2CV had then the headline "horn plus accessories only $5000". This was very clever and Apple should do the same.
- Posted using My iPad
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