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Apple Can't Afford iPhone's Carrier Exclusivity
WirePosted writes with an ITWire article about the problems that Apple's AT&T exclusivity deal could pose in the coming years. Initially the company needed AT&T's commitment to the project, to ensure features like visual voicemail would work. With the iPhone a hit even at its current high price that no longer seems to be the case. Can Apple afford to stick to an exclusive carrier in the future? If for no other reason than consumer choice? "iPhones are being sold unlocked in the markets of Asia where you can't get them with a carrier plan, but they're also being bought and unlocked in the US and Europe. The message is that many and probably most iPhone buyers would like to be given a choice of carrier when they buy their iPhone. Some would be prepared to pay more as they do with other smartphones and buy their iPhone unattached to any subsidized carrier contract. The point is many consumers feel no loyalty to carriers and resent being forced to choose one."
Why can't we have all phones free as in freedom? When I buy a computer I can hook it up to any TCP/IP network and access the internet. Some I pay for and some I don't. When I buy a land line phone, it isn't locked into any phone company. I can plug it into any jack and it works. All I want from my cell provider is a data pipe to get to the internet or the voice network. Period.
Steve Jobs wanted to change the way cell phones are bought but ended up just making so many annoying restrictions, even for customers that want to use AT&T/T-mobile/Orange that he ended up destroying the "simple" experience he so desired. He wanted people to be able to buy the phones directly from Apple without having to sign anything in store and/or online. However, when people started to unlock the phones Apple put in place tons of walls even for buyers that plan to use Apple's carrier. For example, you cannot buy iPhones with cash or Apple gift cards(in the states anyway). They announced this right before Christmas and many potential iPhone buyers already let it be known that they wanted Apple gift cards for Christmas so they could buy the iPhone. Instead, Apple just kicked them in the teeth.
What I don't understand is why, when Apple dropped the price, they didn't just make the price drop a subsidy for AT&T customers instead. They could have offered $200 off AT&T service after the first month that wasn't applicible to cancellation fees, and could have extended it to early adopters so they wouldn't have felt burned. Would have allowed Apple to drop the price to AT&T users(well, it would take a few months to see all the savings I suppose), and would have given Apple 50% more revenue from unlockers. But I think Steve was just so set against "subsidies" that he decided to take the "I'll do anything to prevent you from getting an unlocked iPhone" route instead. I think that costed Apple not only customers and revenue, but a LOT of goodwill too.....
Monstar L
"and then the ability to seamlessly activate via iTunes"
"Seamlessly"? You have to have a computer connected to the Internet just to activate your phone? That is so lame. There's a huge population of people, especially outside the US, who have mobile phones but not computers. I wonder what percentage of those un-activated iPhones were bought by people who didn't realize they had to mess with a PC just to turn the phone on.
And you still can't download music over the air link, can you?
I've read a lot of articles, and at least seen mention of a lot more, that spout off about how Apple screwed up it's iPhone licensing deal by tying themselves to a single carrier. However, a lot of the time within the same article, or another article on the same site will often rave about how it is an example of one of the greatest product launches of all time. If Apple screwed up so bad, how did they do so well? It all strikes me as fanboy baiting. Write an article praising Apple, their products, or their tactics to bring in the apple hater, then write one denigrating Apple, their products, or their tactics (often implying that Apple is the new Microsoft) to bring in the Apple fanboy's (of which I'm arguably one). Each article is carefully crafted to miss obvious points and make glaring mistakes so as to ensure that it's attacked in the message boards driving up the hit counters and making more ad revenue than any other article that day.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
They want control because without control the phone companies ruin the devices and make them suck.
Vodaphone and T-Mobile are two operators that remove features from phones and hack about with the firmware purely because the phones have a feature that would save the end user some money.
It's about time a phone maker stood up to these phone operators, they are overcharging people and they've held back development of easier to use phones and convenient features.
It strikes me that the mobile networking situation in the US right now is what our wired Internet would be in had the greedy money-grubbing carriers been in charge of designing it. Your email would reside in central offices, and you would pay $1 to send or receive one (plus $1 per megabyte of attachments). The Web would be a set of AOL-like walled gardens with mutually incompatible content formats. Yay for VCASTrated YouTube! The scary part is that there were projects at former Bell Labs developing systems along that line under the PCS label. *shudder*
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Suppose, when Toyota brought out the Prius, that the gas filler was square instead of round, and that Mobil gas stations had an exclusive deal to provide gas with square nozzles on their pumps.
Don't you think that would have hurt the popularity of the Prius - especially in areas of the country with poor coverage of Mobil stations - and created a controversy?
Don't you think that a mini-industry of "unlockers" would spring up with square-to-round adapters?
Wouldn't people view Toyota and Mobil as the devil incarnate, and refused to ever do business with either of them ever again?
Last week a guy from America was here in our Tokyo office and he wanted to use his iPhone SIM card in a japanese phone, bummer, does not work. It worked with his previous plan, but well, iPhone SIM is so locked down, nothing works. Plus, the iPhone has no G3 so there is no way it will work in Japan anyway.
Another example why lockdown is just plain stupid.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Really? I actually switched TO T-Mobile from Verizon specifically because T-Mobile didn't do that bullshit locking down the phone's features, crappy hacked firmware, etc. My Blackberry 8800 has full access to the GPS, everything, and my buddy's 8830 doesn't. Almost identical phones, and since he uses Verizon, his is locked down.
It may be different elsewhere, but in the US, T-Mobile is a pretty good carrier.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why the hell do you need to 'activate' the thing at all? I've never 'activated' a phone before in my life. The things just work. And I always buy my phones without a SIM lock and without a subscription. What is this 'activation' business anyway?
-- Cheers!
Again, you're wrong.
I think you don't quite understand how usability research works. This isn't some kind of voodoo where somebody simply determines that something works better than something else. These are valid studies, and there are rules that can be derived from doing these studies which apply to most people. GP mentioned the buttons in dialog boxes: On Windows, the default dialog box is a YesNo box. There's some text, then there are "Yes" or "No" buttons. On the Mac, the buttons contain verbs. For example, if you clean out the Recycle Bin, Windows asks you: "Are you sure you want to delete [your file]?" with "Yes" and "No" as possible answers. Mac OS X asks you something like "Do you really want to delete the Objects in the Trash? You can't undo this." with "Cancel" and "OK" as possible answers (I'm on Windows right now, so I can't check the exact wording). This is certainly not perfect, but it is better than Windows, because "Cancel" obviously cancels what you're doing, while you can't be sure whether "Yes" or "No" cancels the action on Windows. So, did somebody just set up this rule that you have to use verbs in buttons? No, Apple did a lot of usability studies when they originally came up with the Mac interface (read Tog's book on the subject for some interesting anecdotes about this). They found that people were faster and had less errors when the buttons contained verbs, because most people simply don't read the text in the dialog boxes (and if you have done support, as you claim, you'll know this).
Another example is the menu bar you mention. You complain that the "universal" menu bar on the Mac is dumb. That's an opinion. Usability tests have shown that it is, in fact, faster and less error-prone than the "menu bar inside the window" solution on Windows an Linux. Why? Because you can't overshoot the top-of-window menu bar. According to Fitt's law, entries in the menu bar have infinite size. You just jam the mouse to the top of the screen, and you'll hit the menu. Again, the Mac's solution is not perfect, especially if you have multi-window setups, but it is better than the Windows solution, despite of your dislike for it.
Which leads me to my final point: Unless you do studies, you don't know what solution is best, which is probably why you consider usability research BS. Results gained from studies often don't fit personal experience. The reason for this is not that the research is BS; the reason for this is that you can't evaluate usability objectively when you're observing yourself. A great example for this is keyboard shortcuts. People who use keyboard shortcuts think they're faster than using the mouse. Actually doing usability studies shows the mouse generally wins out, except for some specific, often-used shortcuts like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. This is science; hundreds of tests have shown this again and again. Your personal experience does not fit the actual facts. You can't evaluate usability based on your feelings (although a happy user is, of course, important, too :-).