It turns out, Apple never set out to make the iPhone 5C a low-cost phone to compete internationally with lower-priced phones that dominate most of the developing smartphone market.
According to a new interview with Tim Cook, Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi in Bloomberg Businessweek, Apple sees itself as the Ferrari or Porsche of the smartphone market, and is perfectly happy to cede the low end to other companies.
“There’s always a large junk part of the market,” Cook told Businessweek. “We’re not in the junk business.”
That shouldn’t be a surprising message coming from an Apple CEO, considering the company’s history of remaining uncompromising on price and design, even when Windows was dominating the PC market. As it turns out, it seems the rest of the smartphone industry may be coming around to at least one part of Apple’s business model.
When asked about Microsoft’s Nokia acquisition, Cook said that it was validating to see Apple’s competitors adopting its model of handling software and hardware in-house, rather than licensing an operating system out to OEMs.
“We’re not looking for external validation of our strategy, but I think it does suggest that there’s a lot of copying, kind of, on the strategy and that people have recognized that importance,” Cook told Bloomberg.
As of press time, Apple’s stock is up $8.20, or 1.7 percent, following a long slide over the past week following the iPhone 5C and 5S announcement.
