To be sure, this is an unusual version of “free” that we’re talking about but the news from the UK is that as the iPhone 5 is released today then the old iPhone 4 will become free.
Upon Tuesday’s rollout of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, the existing iPhone 4 will be offered for the low, low price of nothing at all when purchased with a presumably two-year contract.
This is, as the piece points out, a one source rumour from a source that often, but not always, gets things right.
It’s also true that signing a two year contract (at whatever hefty monthly rate) is not normally considered to be the same as “free”. Indeed, most of the cellphone industry in Europe has been working on variations of this pricing method for years. Certainly on commercial contracts, sometimes on individual ones, the phne itself is subsidised by the network operator, making the upfront payment for the phone to the user nothing.
That money is then clawed back by the operator over the life of the contract: either from the monthly payments or from some slice of the call revenues themselves.
So, rather than saying that Apple’s iPhone 4 is about to become free it might be more accurate to say that the iPhone 4 is about to become just another handset, subject to the same pricing and sales policies as most other handsets on the market. Something which is a bit of a comedown for Apple really as they’ve prided themselves for years on being entirely different from everyone else.
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