A Minor Journey dot com.

It seems that those nice people at apple UK and 02 are slashing a massive £100 off the price of the iPhone 8GB. While apple are continuing to sell the iPhone on their uk webstore at £269 for the 8GB and £329 for the 16GB model it’s good to see those at O2 doing some price slashing.

Thanks to The Gadget Show for the headup on this one.

_{With an iPhone you can take self portraits without revealing your face…}

Who takes the cut in profit? That’s what I’d like to know. See, Apple get money every time an iPhone is sold and they also take a percentage cut of the bill over the life of the phone. O2 also of course get their own take of profits. I’m pretty sure that one of these things has happened:

• Apple is releasing a new 32GB iPhone shortly, or perhaps the iPhone 2. They’re selling out the old stock in an attempt to release it from the system as quickly as possible. It’s likely that Apple themselves keep a limited number of iPhones in stock whereas somewhere like 02 probably have a larger stock. To get rid of the low end 8GB they’re selling them at a low price until the 1st June. Hmm 1st June eh? Isn’t that a little close to the date of the Apple WWDC, a place where the fabled iPhone firmware 2.0 will be fully released and played with? A coincidence? I think not. I think O2 know something we don’t. You only have to look at the drop in price that the iPhone underwent in the USA last fall to know that we’ve been there before, just before the 8GB iPhone was replaced with a 16GB model…
• The iPhone hasn’t sold as many units as O2 would have liked, and they don’t have the contract for version 2.0. Therefore they’re trying to get rid of as many iPhones as possible before the WWDC. After all, once you have someone locked in to an 18 month contract you’re set, right?
• O2 are just nice people and have a profit margin they’re willing to cut into to bring us great tech at a lower price. Oh maybe… maybe even it’s apple… HA… like we know that apple would *EVER* do anything like that!

Whatever the reason we all know that for those of us who lust after an iPhone things just got interesting. After all, at £169 the iPhone 8GB is now £30 cheaper than an iPod Touch 8GB.

And if you really want to spend that extra £100 just think. You could always spend it on a multitude of iPhone and iPod related gadgets to make sure your phone stays safe and trendy…