Kudos to Steve Jobs for realizing the negative PR that was being generated by Apple's $200 price reduction of its iPhone. Reacting quickly to events, he's announced he's giving a $100 rebate to all existing iPhone owners.

It's in the form of an Apple rebate rather than cash, but at least this should soften the blow of seeing your pricey new toy that you queued days to get suddenly dropping in price like a stone. You can always use the voucher on a shiny new Apple iPod Touch, which, let's face it, is just an iPhone without the phone anyway!

It also rather puts into perspective the madness of how people took Apple's iPhone price drop. If any other manufacturer announced a price drop, the world would be cheering. Indeed, it's rather expected in gadget land that a gadget's price is super-expensive when first released, but quickly comes down as volume and sales increase.

What caused the furore with the iPhone's price reduction was both the surprise of it coming so soon from its launch, and the fact that it's the most hyped gadget of the year, meaning everyone is happy to write about it.

This, of course, if good news when people are writing positive things about it, but the danger of such an obsessive following is that it can turn nasty real quick.

In addition, Apple Apple shot themselves squarely in the foot with their foil to Nokia's ad, making them sound like they don't care about their early adopters, most of whom are the fanboys and girls who generate all the hype in the first place.

So who are the winners in this unseemly PR battle? Well, Nokia, for one, who scored a major PR victory at Apple's expense, and have now forced Apple into a costly rebate exercise; Google are also sitting pretty, as they capitalized both on the extra ad spending that both companies engaged in (although this won't be much), and the terrific exposure they got for their AdWords advertising programme; us users, both late adopters and early adopters; and, belatedly, Apple, for turning a PR disaster round so quickly (although at some cost).

Hmmm, everyone's happy, it seems - I love a happy ending!

[Source: Engadget]