(i)Phony Lawsuit

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I couldn't resist! If you've seen this story, then you certainly know where I'm going with this. It seems some lady in New York is suing Apple Inc. claiming price discrimination due to Apple's decision to cut the price of the iPhone. On a morning when I woke up overjoyed to see that both of my fantasy football teams had won for the week, I thought to myself, now what could possibly make this morning any happier than it has already been? And so of course this wonderful story fell into my lap (or more precisely, onto my computer screen).

This story is so funny to me because I'm the type of person who never buys a new gadget when it is first introduced. For one thing, they almost always have bugs in them. Secondly, they are almost always way overpriced. And so it was the case with the iPhone, which upon initial release enjoyed a roughly 50% profit margin. The more discerning of you will have realized that this article detailing the expected profit margins that Apple would enjoy came out in January of this year. On the other hand, the iPhone was not released until late June. So there was already readily available information suggesting that a person would be wasting a good deal of money in purchasing this item soon after its release. And assuming no complete absence of intuition, a person should have known this anyway. And yet, I recall that people lined up at stores for hours if not overnight to get this thing. And for what reason? Just so that they could for a few brief weeks be cool...or huge dorks.

And so now we come to the point where Apple has decided to slash the price of the iPhone, and for one particular customer, this appears to be an outrage. Obviously, the only reasonable thing to do is to sue Apple, but for how much? Should you sue for $200, which is the difference between the old and new prices? No? Well, how about suing for $399, the new cost of the phone? Doesn't work for you? $599, the original cost of the phone? No deal? Well, why not one million dollars? You know, because $1 million is not all that much these days...