The CEO of Apple is giving those who bought the iPhone at the top $599 list price a $100 rebate in Apple credit. In an open letter on the Apple site , he talks like a guy who’s heard a lot of complaints over the years:

[B]eing in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane.

But in the end he concedes the mistake:

[E]ven though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

As Jobs says, a new price for an old product isn’t unusual, but the hefty one-third price drop (which meant, in turn, that early adopters paid a 50-percent premium) is quite a benchmark.

It doesn’t go without saying that one should never buy the first iteration of an Apple product (that goes double for Windows-related goods); I speak as someone who’s worked on a Mac since a boxy little 512. It’s always best to wait a year to get the hot new Mac thing; there’s always little kinks and sometimes there are big ones. Further tip for price-watchers: The absolute best way to buy a Apple product is to wait until a new product line is announced and then hit an Apple Store or a reseller like MacMall and get the last iteration at a discount, which can be $300 or more on mid-priced laptops.

WSJ ($) story on the imbroglio is here.

NYT story here.

The Journal has the most lucid account of some of the fine print of Jobs’ offer:

Apple and AT&T also said yesterday that customers who had purchased the $599 iPhone, with eight gigabytes of storage capacity, at one of their stores within 14 days of Wednesday’s price cut can choose a $200 cash refund instead of the $100 store credit. People who bought a low-end $499 iPhone model within the 14 days can return it for a full refund instead of taking the credit. Apple on Wednesday said it was discontinuing the low-end iPhone, with four gigabytes of storage, as most of its customers preferred the eight-gigabyte model.