How Times Have Changed!

Why would I bitch? I didn't overpay by $300 for it. : )

Might even consider getting one now, the price is more reasonable and the open architecture, Outlook support, and 3g Wireless make it much more attractive to me.

From my perspective, this just confirms the lesson I learned the hard way by purchasing a first gen ipod: never be an early adopter of a new Apple product.

What "open architecture"? You're just making stuff up.

I don't really know of anyone, personally, who wouldn't agree that it was worth $300--or even $400--to get to have an iPhone for a year's time.

I have no use for Exchange support, never did. 3g is nice, but having a connection of ANY kind is better than zero. 3g is just faster.

The at&t plan goes up by $10 a month for this phone, which means that you'll be spending--wait! $120 more this year than I spent this past year.

And seriously, technology got faster and cheaper! Damn that Apple, pricing things in ways no other tech company does.

Might even consider getting one now, the price is more reasonable...

Not me. The iPod Touch is the convergence device I've been lusting after. Hope Apple does some similarly aggressive price cutting on the top-end iPods.

I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Sure, it'll inevitably come down in price (or, more likely, you'll get more for the same pricetag), but in this case, at&t is taking $240 more from you over the 2 yr contract than it did with the first iPhone.

at&t is also not sharing revenue with apple anymore, so you can bet your ass that at&t is subsidizing the cost of the iPhone 3G.

Keep in mind, too, that you have no choice but to sign a 2yr-contract that INCLUDES a $30/mo data plan to walk out of an apple or at&t store with your own iPhone 3G.

On the other hand, if you don't get a sense of wonder and even joy from a technology purpose, and/or you don't place much value on the transformative powers of futuristic elegance, you won't appreciate the parts of an iPhone that don't show up on a feature list.

Get a free phone from your provider instead and be done with it.

Not a techie (and you know that), so I apologize if I used the term inappropriately, but my understanding of the discussion about SDK and the Apps Store from the presentation was that it opens up the programming to allow anyone to be a developer for the iPhone (albeit with distribution monopolized by Apple). That is what I meant by open architechture.

That's exactly what's happening, but the SDK is about 75% the same as developing for the Mac.

And I can't ever imagine *you* considering anything Mac to be "open". :)

Anyone can be a Mac developer. All the tools from front to back for writing applications is available for free with Mac OS X. Always have been. In fact, each copy of Mac OS X comes with the current developer toolset.

By that measure, Mac development is far more open and available than Windows development.