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Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

This is Apple's way: Release a product at a high price initially to capture extra dollars from early adopters with the extra money while also buying time for Apple to work out kinks in there production chain and also reduce costs as efficiency increases. Six to twelve months later cheaper Apple Watches will come out.

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That doesn't seem to match my offhand recollections. Apple tends to keep price points the same and just update specs occasionally. The first iPhone famously had a price drop quite soon, but has that been true for their other product lines?

The MacBook Air went from being their most insanely expensive product to their entry-level without changing all too much (besides the requisite performance upgrades).

Good point. I'm still skeptical that's the plan for the watch, but I guess it's plausible at least.

I don't think Apple needs that handful of extra dollars from early adaptors.

The reason the initial price is high is because its easier to decrease a retail price than it is to increase it.

Apple tends not to lower their prices. Instead, they offer newer models will with more features at stable price points.

If prices do drop (e.g. the 5s) it's because an older product is still being sold alongside a newer one at the standard price.

This is not the case with first run products. The original iPhone's price was $599 (8GB) and $499 (4GB) when it was released in June 2007. Then in September of the same year they discontinued the 4GB model and dropped the price of the 8GB down to $400.

I'm not saying that they will drop the price of the watch but there is a history of them doing this with the first run of a product. Also someone mentioned they did something similar with the MBA in this thread.

Good point, though I think that few people paid that directly. From what I recall, base models have been $200 with a two year contract from the word go.

Nope, people who paid $600+ for an iPhone still had to have a two-year contract, they didn't even get compensated for it with a subsidy. And at the same time that you paid $600, AT&T was giving Apple a cut of the contract, something like 10 bucks a month from your AT&T bill went straight to Apple in the beginning. So Apple was really getting around $840 per iPhone over the life of the contract, $600 up front and $10/month for 24 months.

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