Ms. Qiu actually didn’t want that at all. At least that’s what she said when she was arrested. The woman from the southeast Chinese province of Fujian had stolen an iPhone from a shop, selling price the equivalent of almost 900 euros. But not just like that. With her teeth she gnawed through the cable that secured the expensive smartphone against theft. The alarm went off afterwards, but Ms. Qiu was still able to slip out of the shop like them South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
But Qiu hadn’t considered one thing. Of course, such a store is equipped with surveillance cameras. And so it wasn’t just the police who managed to arrest the woman near her apartment. All of China is now also amazed by the images from the security cameras as she pretends to swipe the screen to other customers. But she gnaws at the cable and finally manages to cut it. “She has good teeth,” quipped one online commenter.
According to the SCMP report, when she was caught – allegedly with the help of facial recognition – she said she actually wanted to buy a new cell phone. She recently lost her own. But when she saw the prices in the store, she spontaneously thought of stealing one. With a selling price of just under 900 euros, the iPhone 14 plus that she stole was not even the most expensive smartphone in Apple’s range. The iPhone 14 pro max costs almost twice as much. And this despite the fact that the successor model, the iPhone 15, will be presented next week.
iPhones keep the price level for a long time
Apple is the only manufacturer that generally manages to maintain the high price level of its products. iPhones are also cheaper at some point than Apple’s price list indicates. However, Apple is spared the sharp price reductions that the competition usually has to grant weeks or a few months after the start of sales. The reasons for this are diverse. On the one hand, Apple manages to stylize itself as the top benchmark for smartphones, although the competition keeps up technologically or is even better in some areas. This is accompanied by a certain snob effect: an iPhone is both a status symbol and a fashion accessory.
This is a huge advantage for Apple. Because the Californians stay away from the entry-level smartphone category, they benefit from the higher profit margins that can be achieved with high-end devices. Making the memory expandable with inexpensive micro SD cards has never occurred to Apple. If you want more memory, you pay a disproportionate amount more than the memory chips actually cost.
On the other hand, Apple also offers very long update cycles for its iPhones, the repurchase value is considerably higher than that of the competition. With this, only the high-end phones usually get new software versions of a similar length. According to rumors from the industry, Apple now wants to raise the price level again with the iPhone 15. The new iPhones will cost up to $200 more.