When the first iPhone was released, 11 years ago, the starting price was $499. At the time, the price was mocked by Apple’s competitors as being unrealistically high. Apple did pull the price back for devices on AT&T contracts for the next couple phones, while the iPhone was still exclusively on the US network, but you could still buy one outright for $499 t0 $599. That’s about half of what a new iPhone costs now.
When the first iPhone was released, 11 years ago, the starting price was $499. At the time, the price was mocked by Apple $AAPL’s competitors as being unrealistically high. Apple did pull the price back for devices on AT&T $T contracts for the next couple phones, while the iPhone was still exclusively on the US network, but you could still buy one outright for $499 t0 $599. That’s about half of what a new iPhone costs now.
Apple’s most recent phones are its most expensive ever, starting at $1,000, before you add in sales tax, protection coverage, and anything else you might need to use your new phone.
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While the original phones may have seemed comically expensive to people at the time, we all know what happened. The iPhone turned Apple from a successful computer company to the most valuable business in the world, with the phones accounting for somewhere between half and two-thirds of Apple’s revenue in any given quarter for the next decade.
Recently, iPhones have dramatically increased in price, with the average cost of a phone the company sells now sitting at around $800, up from $650 just a couple years ago. Even after adjusting for inflation, no iPhone comes close to being as cheap in price as the 2007 original.
Of course, a new iPhone offers quite a bit more than its decade-old one sibling. The original iPhone came with a 2-megapixel camera (which couldn’t record video), 4 GB of storage, and a 3.5-inch display. The new iPhone Xs has two cameras (12 megapixels each), 54 GB of storage, and a 5.8-inch HD display.
