if you have $200 more and $100 less for each buyer, you don't loose $100 million dollars. You win $100 million dollars.

What can you buy with the $100 voucher ? 3 protective covers for your iPhone ?

How many of those people will actually use that voucher? What if when the iPhone first came out it was a huge hit! 5 million phones were sold instead of the 1 million and sales kept soaring. Yeah... so they wouldn't have dropped the price and kept bringing it in. As soon as sales lag they drop the price, everyone screams, they give $100 bucks away (but not necessarily everyone collects it and those that do have a chance of spending even more) and in the end Apple gets a ton of great press and everyone that has an iPhone loves them even more (which they then tell all their friends about, which is the best type of marketing). Either way, brilliant!

The obvious thing to do with the $100 rebate is to get the $129 Bluetooth headset. This probably costs Apple around $35 to make and another $20 to package, distribute and advertise, so they are definitely coming out ahead on this, and I get to have the over-priced headset "free" (or nearly so). I'm happy, the bean counters are happy and Apple sails through this and boosts sales. The more iPhones out there, the better for all who own one -- we all win.

More like a marketing snafu. How many people will wait next time (at least a couple of months) to get the next big Apple product just in case that price comes down much sooner than it should have? Messing up the big bang around the product launch that they spent millions to hype.

But the rebate only applies to those who purchased at the initial pricing, so their base is much less than the $100M

Not much of a SNAFU here... If you go back a ways with Apple, there was a brand new "wicked fast" system (to quote Mr. Jobs) called the Macintosh IIfx - indeed, it was the fastest system (Apple or PC) on the market at the time, with a 40MHz Motorola 68030 processor (think 80386 Dx40 or thereabouts). People paid in excess of $5000 for this wonderful system.

Six weeks later, Apple introduced the Quadra line, based upon the 68040 chip, the slowest of which was about 40 - 50% faster than the IIfx.

Apple has a history of this type of marketing, so this is really nothing new. If you need to have the latest gadget, or subscribe to the "Bigger, Better, Faster, More" school of system design, there will always be a reason to buy the latest toy....

When this happened, I said that it was a marketing gimmick.

Well, it's all been said here, but to summarize:
- The base is not 1M, it's that percentage of early iPhone buyers who bought the 8 Gig model only.
- Their markup is indeed about 35%, dropping the "cost" considerably.
- When you have an iPhone, you have an iPod -- besides accessories, what else would one buy at an Apple store besides a Mac or some big ticket item? Lotsa profit there!!! (Accessories are heavily marked up anyway.)

Yup -- a marketing ploy, calculated to bring Apple much more money that what the rebate costs them!!!

Let's not forget (1) this "extra" $100 million has been and probably still is invested or in the bank somewhere making money for Apple, (2) a certain percentage of folks never claim their rebates (more money still in Apple's pockets), (3) there's probably a task break or credit in this somewhere for Apple, and (4) how many millions of dollars worth of free publicity Apple is getting from all of the bloggers, industry publications, radio/TV technology pundits, etc. who make this frontpage news. That old Hollywood and politician's saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity is certainly true for tech companies; I've seen stocks and sales rise just because the company is in the news -- even if the news isn't all that flattering. A contrite Apple "apologizing" to those early customers with a rebate/credit paints itself as generous and customer-friendly, and the result? Everyone's talking about Apple and the iPhone again now that the initial hoopla has faded. iPhone sales will begin to rise again. Just watch.

I, for one, will use the rebate to buy another iphone for my wife.