I disagree. The new iPhones are muddying up the picture and losing the distinctiveness of the iPhone - it is less and less an instantly recognizable phone, and since social signaling has always been a large part of iPhone marketing and image, that is a mistake. In the same vein, cheaper models kill the exclusiveness of the brand. In a way the gold model illustrates this shift perfectly, flying in the face of Apple's longtime 'tasteful and minimalist' philosophy and towards mass market.
Of course, this might be a calculated move to move away from exclusivity, in which case those things make sense. But that would be a little baffling in itself, given the huge profit margins a premium brand commands (while still having huge market share in Apple's case) compared to any old mass market device.
> it is less and less an instantly recognizable phone
How so? People were already using cases that camouflage the device somewhat.
>cheaper models kill the exclusiveness of the brand
This is the thing, there have already been "cheaper models". With every year when a new version comes out, the old ones got cheaper. Don't they give out the 4 or 4S for free with a contract right now?
You might also have heard bickering that the 5C is not the "cheap iPhone" everybody expected. Seeing as it is priced not nearly anywhere you would call "cheap".
Instead of continuing this behavior of simply keeping last years version of the phone around and selling them cheaper, Apple now decided to not do that this year and instead try and vamp up the old phone a bit so as to not just go "yeah, this is our new phone and of course the old one you already know but now, it gets a little cheaper"
> People were already using cases that camouflage the device somewhat.
It's more about the actual offering - the iPhone - that Apple makes. The more crisp this idea is in the head of consumers, the better the positioning. It is more difficult for a product to be iconic the more variations of it there are.
> the old ones get cheaper
Again, it is about what Apple's offering is. I don't think selling out old inventory interferes with the idea of what their current offering is. In fact the better defined each model is, the easier to distinguish last year's model from the current one.
> the 5C is not the "cheap iPhone" everybody expected. Seeing as it is priced not nearly anywhere you would call "cheap".
It is still cheaper, so now the iPhone I show off only signals that I spent whatever the cheapest model costs. Might not be a huge difference but I still believe it hurts important signaling value that used to be attached to the iPhone.
> It is still cheaper, so now the iPhone I show off only signals that I spent whatever the cheapest model costs.
Isn't it the other way around? Under the old system, you bought a "high end" 4S. Then Apple introduce the iPhone 5, drop the 4S to a low price, and now your 4S is suddenly the "cheap" iPhone. Under this new system, you bought an iPhone 5, they introduce the 5C, drop the iPhone 5, and your iPhone 5 is still recognizable as the high end model.
It's certainly interesting. It basically seems to be translating the old Macintosh consumer/"pro" division to the iPhone: remember the choice between a white plastic MacBook and a brushed-metal MacBook Pro? Now, everyone I knew who could afford it bought an MBP even if they weren't "pros" in any relevant sense, or any sense at all, but the Pro label probably helped to soften the impression of business-class/economy-class stratification. If anything the new 5S seems to be pursuing luxury-brand status more wholeheartedly than the MBP - the famous gold-finish 5S seems to gesture broadly in the direction of blingphones like the http://www.vertu.com/ Vertu. It is certainly a change from the old, (notionally) classless and one-for-all image of the iPod.
> Of course, this might be a calculated move to move away from exclusivity, in which case those things make sense. But that would be a little baffling in itself, given the huge profit margins a premium brand commands (while still having huge market share in Apple's case) compared to any old mass market device.
On the one hand, it seems the smartphone market has now matured to the point where Apple can't just charge the same margins and hope to maintain the same sales and ("Developers! Developers! Developers!") market share. Probably because the remaining big growth in smartphones is now in developing economies, especially in China. Tim Cook talked quite a lot about China at the iPhone 5S/C launch. (Meanwhile many US and other saturated-economy consumers are probably a bit more price-sensitive now too, aware of decent Android 4.x alternatives at lowish prices.) The consumer/"pro" split allows the cheaper, more-mass-market iPhone to have a design and a branding which makes it desirable in its own right, allows it to look up-to-date rather than stuck on whatever was fashionable 18 or 24 months ago, and makes it less obviously a hand-me-down product. Meanwhile, the high-end iPhone can maintain its price premium and its halo of desirability - in fact it its image can now be more clearly exclusive than before. (So matching the increasing "one-percentisation" of society: two birds with one stone.) Yes, this means there are now two iPhone sub-brands rather than just one, but two is not excessively many: it worked rather well for the Mac, after all.
There's also the claims you hear that many Asian markets rather like big, splashy colours, and that they didn't really love the iPhone's relative sombreness. I can't say how true that actually is, but it would stand to reason that in markets where the iPhone was never all that huge the customers would not be all that sold on the mystique of the One True Phone and its unmatchable design, and would quite like Apple to meet them halfway on appearance as well as price.
Of course, this might be a calculated move to move away from exclusivity, in which case those things make sense. But that would be a little baffling in itself, given the huge profit margins a premium brand commands (while still having huge market share in Apple's case) compared to any old mass market device.