Most people got tempted into a 2-year contract getting the first one, where none of the handset price was offset by the carrier, unlike nearly every other phone every sold in the U.S.

Now there's a carrier discount, the same 2-year contract, and a faster connection (along with a ton of other features), and the contract price is the same as every other smartphone.

What, are you one of these guys? ;-)

There's a lot of reasons no one needs an expensive piece of consumer electronics with a monthly fee, but all these price tallies I'm seeing all over the net make it out like the pricing systems are some kind of new trend.

Did anyone really think apple was ever going to change the real price of the phone? They are price point masters. No Apple product ever gets cheaper, they just get "better".

I agree, I'm simply referring to the monthly rate change. It goes from about $60 to $80 per month. That's an extra $480 over 2 years. So the price drop in the phone is more than offset by the extra monthly charge.

But compared to other smartphones it's still a great competitor on features/price. I don't need a fancy device, but now that it has GPS with turning directions it would be like buying a phone + iPod + TomTom/Garmin wrapped into one, so I'm thinking about it. (I don't have an iPod or GPS.)

I've seen the figures about the $480, but that doesn't make sense to me, since as far as I can tell, the only increase was the data plan, which goes from $20 to $30.

The thing is, that is almost definitely *not* where AT&T's recouping the $200. Assuming they work the same way Cingular/Verizon did when my soul languished in the eternity that was work at Radio Shack, every handset you buy is discounted by the same amount. For example, at Radio Shack, every time we sold a phone, the actual amount that went towards our commission was the phone price + $200, no matter what the phone was. That's why you can't just go into a store and buy that cheap replacement phone at $29 unless they can get you into some kind of new contract.

I'm saying, the reason they're charging more for the data plan is because AT&T is at the head of the group of ISPs that like to oversell their bandwidth and are freaking out about how much real internet users "abuse" their service. Also, given what I'm hearing about speeds, I wonder if they're capping the total bandwidth for fear of getting blasted by the iPhone. I've heard about 3G data being so fast for years and years, and now they're saying "yeah, it's a whopping 3x faster than EDGE!!"