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AT&T Playing Hardball With Apple?
Ponca City, We Love You writes "There's some interesting speculation from Cringley on why AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson let drop that a new version of Apple's iPhone will be introduced in 2008. The announcement is sure to cut into Apple's Christmas sales and could also cost ATT a million new customers and at least $1 billion in market cap, says Cringley. 'It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York,' says Cringley. 'He came to the turf of his 'partner' and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn't really need Apple despite the iPhone's success.' What may be troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T's discovery that Apple may be joining Google in bidding."
basically, the fact that apple will unveil a 3g iphone is (and was) obvious - with or without that att dude blabbing about it.
the people who'd care about the existence of a higher network tech iphone have either bought an iphone already or they haven't and won't get a 2.5 iphone, anyway.
he also didn't say when next year. "next year" is a pretty long time frame.
It should not come as a surprise to anybody (except perhaps the logic-impaired Cringely) that perhaps Apple might feel the need to release a product update in a rapidly evolving market sometime before the sucker is completely obsolete. The fact that 3G capability is a glaring hole in the current model is not exactly front-page news. Also, "sometime next year" could mean a span as long as 17 months, an eternity in the cell phone market. I would expect that it will receive a flash capacity bump at the same time (at least a doubling).
Also, where does the $1 Billion number come from? The same dark, damp, place that produced the "fact" that IBM was going to lay off half of its worldwide workforce?
Cringely: Wild Speculation for folks too dumb for Dvorak.
SirWired
Speculation is one way to put it, crazy conspiracy theory is another.
So AT&T CEO decides to drop 1 million customers and 1 billion in market cap (!?) in order to send a message to Apple not to bid on the wireless spectrum auction, that's his theory? If I was an AT&T shareholder I'd be wondering why not just phone them instead...
Is this the same guy who predicted Apple and Intel merging
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I know AT&T is a much larger, more powerful company than Apple, but exactly how can they play hardball with Apple on this issue? If Apple drops them, signs with another carrier -- or even none -- for their next iPhone, it would be AT&T that loses money, not Apple. Apple has already made a nice bundle with the iPhone, so they probably don't really need AT&T anymore and as popular as the iPhone is, AT&T can be replaced. Does AT&T think that the primary reason people want the iPhone is because of AT&T? Obviously that is not the case, since so many people are unlocking them as soon as they get them. Seems like it would be the other way around, with Apple in a good position to play hardball with AT&T. Maybe I need more coffee, because I just don't see it.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
The industry is going to go through some wrenching changes because new players are going to be more willing to open their networks (for real, not pretending to like Verizon). What new players? Clearwire and Google, or a combination thereof.
This will make it easier for phone/device manufacturers to provide genuinely innovative products. If AT&T wants to stick it to Apple, they're going to find their bargaining position weakening. Quickly, I hope.
TWW
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This is all about telecoms versus mobile phone manufacturers, also known as business as usual. If a telecom thinks that is business is more than just offering connection, as in being a carrier, and as more being an service provider or an experience, then the number one competitors are the handsets manufacturers as they are the ones beside operator to influence and have place in customers hand.
Just to give some examples... Nokia has worldwide market share of approximately 40%, but in US its market share is only 5%. Why is it? Well it could be because they don't manufacture CDMA based handsets anymore (direct attack against Qualcomm), but mainly because in US handset business in operator business where operators offer to consumers what they think suites best for operators not for the consumers. To operators it suites that handsets are limited or walled, and to operators it suites better that the brand power of an handset is less than the branding power of operator. This has meant that operators don't want to offer Nokias handsets as to them Nokia is too powerful player in branding and service base, and so offering Nokias handsets more would hurt their position in longer time-frame.
What basically AT&T is doing to Apple is just business as usual. Kick them where it hurts. Weaken their position and try to make a better deal with them. Also it should be noted that market situation has changed as major handset manufacturers and also lesser known Asian manufacturers are all offering and bringing iPhone clones to markets. For AT&T it could be lucrative to just get some iPhone clones from far east with bargain price and brand them by themselves.
Of course there is remote possibility that mobile operators in US are colluding against Apple. There are only few GSM based operators in US, and I could easily imagine them speaking with each other to maintain status-quo in the market. So in example AT&T kicks Apple first, then as Apple talks to T-Mobile or other player, they just throw their hands up and say "oh, but we are not interested at that price", and voila telecoms win.
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I don't know. Why do Americans often say "could careless" when they mean "couldn't careless"?
Brits aren't the only ones. I think you'll find that many English speaking nations speak English as they do in England....
But the press release also made another thing quite clear: their application does not include any partners. So. No partners means no Apple partnership, which means that there was nothing for AT&T's CEO to find out.
You misread the summary. By "joining Google in bidding" the poster meant that Apple will also be bidding on the 700MHz spectrum--not that they will partner with Google in bidding for it. This isn't a partnership--it's the two going head-to-head for something they both want.
This guy's the limit!
While not a perfect measure of a company, currently Apples market cap (159.5 Billion) is greater than IBM's (144.9 Billion). AT&T is currently at 231.7 Billion market, cap, so by that commonuly used measure, AT&T is still bigger.
I would wager that IBM didn't blow off Apple, but that IBM really couldn't deliver a performance competitive in a form with a TDP appropriate for laptops, with the final straw being Intel releasing Core2, for all intents and purposes erasing the instructions per clock advantage the PPC architecture had. (I know Apple made the jump before that, but I guarantee you that Intel shared the Core2 info with Apple).
Apple smartened up and realized that even when IBM made up for it, the simple fact was that Apple wasn't able to consistently differentiate themselves on hardware performance (and it really wasn't one of their goals now anyway), so they decided to play in the same market as their competitors, ensuring that they wouldn't appear to be left behind at any point in time. Extra bonus of Windows compatibility in the face of the market reality of desktop software. They chose to differentiate on brand, styling, and software (to an extent).
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... leads to Apple & Google creating a quality & service oriented network ...
"join in bidding" means they will be bidding against each other, competing.
...Chief executive Randall Stephenson let drop that a new version of Apple's iPhone will be introduced in 2008...Doesn't Apple sue information leakers out of existence? Not that it takes an Einstein to guess that anyway.
Apple needing AT&T? Only for a few special iPhone features. If Apple opened the iPhone to any carrier and passed off that special feature set, AT&T would likely be everyone's last carrier choice so who needs who?
Most of the stuff on
Right now, most of the 3G chipsets are still relatively bulky and draw fairly high-power
Sorry, but that's uninformed drivel.
3G and 3.5G handsets come in slivers that are a few millimeters thick and have excellent battery life:
http://www.mobilegazette.com/nokia-6500-classic-07x05x31.htm
http://ezinearticles.com/?Sony-Ericsson-W-880i-Black---Experience-the-Walkman-Phone&id=534534
Some of them even throw in WiFi. Those phones aren't even particularly expensive (about $15 for the Nokia with activation).
The US phone market is several years behind Europe technologically. In part, that's because it's so fragmented and because the US chose frequencies different from the standard ones used mostly everywhere else.
Oh, and you can get a 3.5G iPhone-like phone: the Samsung F700; it looks superb, and squeezes a full keyboard into something with roughly the same form factor and look as the iPhone:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/apple-iphone-vs-samsung-f700-which-is-touchscreenier-235112.php
People keep quoting the 1-2 million handsets sold by Apple as being a large number. I hate to bring reality into this argument but the growth in mobile handset sales this year in China alone is over 10 million units. There are startup mobile handset makers in China who within 18 months of their creation have sold over 7 million handsets so Apples numbers look rather poor too me. AT&T have realised what many within the industry have, Apples sales although generating allot of publicity are small fish in the scheme of things.
I'll just quote from the same article:
"A similar decision will have to be made by Verizon Wireless, which this week applied ITS reality distortion field to trying to make us believe the second-largest U.S. mobile operator actually intends to open its wireless network to non-Verizon devices and services. Yeah, right.
Verizon's move is straight from the playbook of the old AT&T back in the 1970s, when that company was trying to keep third-party telephone handsets from being connected to its network. If you are old enough you may remember AT&T expressed great fear back then that telephones not from its Western Electric subsidiary (now Alcatel-Lucent) would somehow "damage" the telephone network. It was the same excuse used to keep old guys like me from wearing jeans in high school.
We will, no doubt, see similar behavior from Verizon as it slowly releases network interface specifications then embarks on a certification program that will surprisingly reject as incompatible a lot of perfectly fine mobile phones. But this is months or even years away. The company's intent right now is to show the appearance of motion."
Or in other words, saying it is one thing. Doing it is something else...
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