Apple Makes $831 On Each AT&T iPhone

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NYTimes reports that Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, has studied Apple's financial statements and come to the conclusion that AT&T is paying Apple $18 a month, on average, for each iPhone sold by Apple and activated on AT&T's network — up to $432 over a two-year contract. This shows how much incentive Apple has to maintain its exclusive deal with AT&T rather than to sell unlocked phones or cut deals with multiple carriers. Last week Apple disclosed that 250,000 iPhones had been purchased but not registered with ATT that Apple thinks are being unlocked so Apple has now taken action to curb unauthorized resellers by limiting sales of the iPhone to two per customer and requiring that purchases must now be made with a credit or debit card — cash will not be accepted." The latter article links to a US Treasury page explaining the incorrectness of the widely-held belief that cash cannot be refused for any transaction.

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Re:tiny little dot

[david_thornley]

Technically, there is no such thing as a US driver's license. There's about fifty different ones, since they're issued by states. The central government is trying to introduce central standards (the RealID program), but is meeting fierce resistance from some states. I wouldn't expect typographical oddities to be the same on Minnesota, Maine, Montana, and Mississippi licenses.

The central government does issue passports. If there's anything odd in design about one of them, it's odd about all of them.