Why Apple Got It Right

Steve Jobs is sorry.

Apple's(AAPL) CEO wants to return to you $100 of what you paid when you bought your iPhone too early -- provided, of course, you spend the $100 in one of his stores.

Why do I get the feeling this is exactly what Steve Jobs had planned all along? Chances are that the extra $100 you would have saved, had the iPhone been appropriately priced to begin with, would have been spent outside an Apple store.

Now it's staying in Apple's coffers, and Steve Jobs looks like a caring, responsive CEO who didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.

So Apple wins again. Forget the news stories that say Apple cut its price because sales were sluggish. On Tuesday, iSuppli, a research firm, said that nearly one in 50 mobile phones sold in the U.S. was an iPhone, and that Apple was on track to sell 4.5 million iPhones this year. On Thursday, after the price cut news, iSuppli reiterated that view.

"iPhone outsold all competing smartphone and feature-phone models in the United States in July on an individual basis," iSuppli said in a report. "Apple was generating a robust hardware margin at its previous pricing, and will still be profitable at the new pricing."

I suspect the repriced iPhone will be a wash: What it loses from the abrupt discount it will easily make up in holiday-season volume. And it will end the year with an even higher market share in handsets.