a hundred bucks of shiny stuff
Unlike my husband, I was not especially perturbed about the sudden iPhone price drop.* Oh sure, it stung a bit to have the price drop so quickly after I bought mine (I had been expecting the usual procedure of “Wait 6 months/a year, introduce a better one, and drop the price on the previous one.”) After all, no one WANTS to pay more money than they have to for anything.
But I tended to fall more in the John Gruber camp: I paid $600 for an item that was worth $600 to me. If it wasn’t worth $600 to me, I should not have paid that much for it. And since I still love my iPhone, I adopted the “viva la capitalism” approach.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t take the $100 store credit offered to early adopters. I think it was a nice “No, we don’t take you for granted” gesture by Apple, and besides, since I’m considering my $600 gone and spent, it’s essentially $100 free from Apple. Duh.
And as I hoped, the store credit claim process is completely painless- you don’t still need to have your store receipt, or even the box your iPhone came in. You can complete it with just your phone number and the serial number etched into the back of your iPhone. The process took me about 3 minutes, including waiting for the claim code to come by SMS and printing out my credit code. You can claim your iPhone credit too.
*Probably contributing to our difference of perspective, Tom’s iPhone was purchased out of our household budget- we decided that the Bridge Family Budget could only responsibly support one iPhone purchase at a time, and agreed that since Tom runs his business essentially off his cell phone and his laptop, those two items have to be the best they can be, and are therefore worthy priorities. Also, he would have to start supporting it for his clients, so we bought his first, with the idea that I would get mine later. My iPhone, on the other hand, was purchased sooner than anticipated due to an unexpected windfall I received from one of my personal projects that I had never expected to make money from. So for Tom, the early iPhone purchase affected our shared bank account, while for me, it just meant that my “fun money” didn’t stretch as far as it otherwise could have just a few weeks later. From that perspective, it’s not hard to see why Tom was bent about it and I wasn’t.