I'm guessing next year's refresh will feature a much lower price. I think Apple is finding out the hard way that increasing prices means lower volumes. They might even pull off a mid year price reduction. They've done that before.

Despite not owning one, I believe Apple can easily fix most of their issues by simply reducing the price and growing volumes again. They are about to lose the teenage market. That's mostly a cost problem. For the past few years they've cashed in on their popularity by squeezing the high end of the market. Now that that is running dry, they need to pay attention to their bottom line again or they risk permanently alienating a new generation of users.

My guess is that a 500$ base model that doesn't suck, would be quite popular. Of course their problem is that they have little to differentiate the 1200 $ model from that and that most of their competition is selling quite nice phones at or below that price.