Apple: Cheap phones will never be our focus

Phil Schiller has told a Chinese newspaper that Apple will not make budget smartphones a focus.

Speaking to Shanghai Evening News (and translated by The Next Web), Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing spoke relatively candidly about the rumours the brand is set to unveil a handset with a more affordable price point to satisfy new markets.

He said that cheap smartphones would never be Apple's product development direction. "Although Apple's market share of smartphones is just about 20 per cent, we own 75 per cent of the profit," added Schiller, highlighting the importance of profits over market share in Apple's strategy.

He also pointed to the fact China was transitioning from featurephones to cheaper smartphones, presumably with implication that the country would eventually embrace the higher end of the market, thus bringing in maximum profit revenue.

Better than best

Schiller also highlighted the manufacturing practices employed by Apple, namely the efforts to use the only best technology available (such as the Retina display and the chassis materials) in order to make a superior product.

Whether Apple will find a way to wriggle around this statement in the future is going to be the subject of much debate - after all, the iPad mini seemed to both contradict and confirm Steve Jobs' statement about a seven-inch tablet being too small, so what chance a cheaper (but not too cheap) iPhone appearing any time soon?