The iPhone 5c
Color is more than just a hue. It expresses a feeling. Makes a statement. Declares an allegiance. Color reveals your personality. iPhone 5c, in five anything-but-shy colors, does just that. It’s not just for lovers of color. It’s for the colorful.
Before the event, the entire tech press had come to the conclusion that the purpose of the 5c was to offer a more affordable version of the iPhone.
This assumption was wrong. The true role of the 5c is now clear. It was necessary because the iPhone 5 had a cost-structure that was too high to allow Apple to keep selling it with a $100 discount, as they have done with every other previous iPhone generation.
As such, they needed to engineer a tweaked iPhone 5 which could be profitably sold on as the mid-tier iPhone for 2013-2014. The 5c exists not to make the iPhone lineup move into a new price-point, but to stand in for the iPhone 5 so that Apple could continue hitting its usual price-points.
Therefore, for another cycle, Apple’s iPhone offerings are available at $450, $550, $650. Just like last year and the year before that. I’m disappointed they didn’t break the mould.