No $99 iPhone, apparently

Wired has a blog by Charlie Sorrel debunking the Apple rumors:

Apple rumors are always hot stuff, but often the readers of these made-up facts get carried away and take them as true. And the origin of this speculation is often an analyst, a grown man or woman who should really know better.
The latest of these rumors is the $99 Wal-Mart iPhone, such a preposterous proposition that we thought we'd take a look at the rather obvious reasons why Apple won't be stripping either the price or the capacity of its highly successful cellphone.
And while we're at it, we debunk the Apple netbook and the Apple tablet, two other rumors that refuse to die:
$99 iPhone
According to the entire internet, Apple will, just after Christmas, sell a 4GB iPhone through Wal-Mart for $99. The usual excuse is made: Apple needs to sell cheaper hardware in "these troubled times". Apple will in fact sell iPhones through Wal-Mart, but they will be the same ones you can get elsewhere. What every one of these analysts fails to understand is the Apple business model. The company just doesn't do cheap.
Look at it this way: Apple's PC market share continues to grow. The iPhone seems unstoppable. The new "expensive" unibody MacBooks are doing just fine. Why on earth would Apple undercut its own successful iPhone line with a cheap version? If it can sell as many $200 or even $300 iPhones as it likes, why sell a $100 one?
The 4GB part of this rumor irks, also. Name one other product line from Apple which has seen a memory decrease. You can't. The fact that Apple already discontinued the 4GB iPhone because the sales were slow compared to the 8GB model should tell us something. Yes, there might be a 4GB iPhone for $99. It will be announced at the exact same time as a 5GB HDD iPod. With a physical clickwheel.
Tablet
We love the persistence of this rumor, mostly because we would actually buy an oversized iPod Touch device. But we have the feeling that, after an hour or so of playing, we'd want to go outside and the oversized iPod Touch wouldn't fit in our pocket. We further imagine that we'd soon hanker for a proper keyboard to get some work done. The thing is, Apple already makes a tablet PC, and it is the current iPod Touch.
The other problem would be price. How much would Apple charge for a tablet? It would have to be a lot more than the Touch, itself already an expensive little device at the 32GB end. What would you pay? $800? $1000? That's a little too much for such a specialist computer.
Netbook
Steve Jobs dismissed the netbook market as "nascent". This certainly doesn't mean that Apple won't make one – Jobs has a history of denying entire product categories until Apple is ready to actually ship – but don't expect an Apple netbook anytime soon. Why? Apple almost never rushes products to market. Look at any Apple success of the last few years and you'll see not a brand new product but a simpler, often better version of what has been around for a while. The iPod was certainly not the first portable MP3 player, the iPhone wasn't the first touch screen smartphone, although in both cases you'd be forgiven for thinking so.
One day, I'm sure we'll see a tiny MacBook with a proper keyboard and a trackpad you can actually use. But it will be a while, and it will probably cost more than the competition.

Rico says he'll buy the Tablet, at any reasonable price. Maybe a NetBook, too...