With the iPhone coming way down in price quickly after launch, there appear to be a number of previous buyer’s expressing remorse (really more like outrage) at this new development. An interesting discussion on the economics of this situation is happening at Marginal Revolution.

This is a great example of a physical asset with properties similar to that of information assets – the temporal notion of "value" and how easily things can change in relative context. We’ve known this for a long time, and yet we still manage to perform all sorts of calculations that require valuation – e.g. insurance companies use residual value, replacement value, and repair value in their policies as a way to be more specific about this variability.

At the time of spending, information assets must be worth at least as much
as the cost of the project, e.g. an SAP implementation that costs over $50 million must be processing at least that much in value for the company that embarked on it. That doesn’t mean it will always retain that value, but it is a stable number to work with.

I don’t know if there are any iPhone purchasers out there who are factoring the iPhone’s information asset value – it’s contribution to your ability to make phone calls, surf the web, etc… Perhaps that is because it’s relative value is nil compared with the substitutes available.