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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.
No, most of those are the advantages Apple can give their customers with carrier exclusivity.
What Apple gets from carrier exclusivity is the ability to get a portion of the monthly charges from the carrier. Based on reports, Apple gets a significant portion of the customer's monthly payment to AT&T (and O2 in the UK, and T-Mobile in France, and ...); they would not be able to do that without the exclusivity.
Even $10/month from the customer means that Apple would be getting an additional $240 over the course of the 2-year contract; that's a pretty significant reason to continue to push for exclusivity for a while.
Apple's "pleasant experience end to end" is wrong
Indeed. I really hate it when people make things that don't suck. I mean, come on, companies of America. Bring me stuff that's unpleasant. I want the suck!
Why does the designer of the phone have any say at all as to who can service it?
I don't know, perhaps the designer of the phone has features they want to include that aren't part of the standard feature set? Like being able to activate at home without having to wait for a sales droid. Or visual voicemail. Or perhaps they don't want customers of their phones to have to wade through a sea of bizarre contracts and options? But again, that's part of that pleasant experience that you think is wrong.
I can't respect the reasoning of someone who says that the end-to-end user experience is irrelevant or that the desire to design it is wrong or unrealistic--and then, in the same breath, talk about all the people who want iPhones. It's the same kind of thinking as people who say iPods should support WMA just because they're popular.
To be absolutely clear--the whole REASON why there's such demand for Apple products is because, unlike many tech companies, they DO care about the entire user experience. It makes using the product simple, easy, convenient. Would people buy Apple products if they WEREN'T easy to use, if that end-to-end experience WASN'T designed? It frustrates me to no end to hear people gripe about "user choice and freedom" but at the same time they covet the simplicity and elegance of Apple's design approach, not realizing that their interfaces and hardware are what they are precisely because it doesn't allow you to customize the crap out of it and ultimately break it in a million ways.
I've owned products by many different companies--Motorola, Samsung, Sony (and those are just mobile phones). And not a single one of them has been anywhere near as successful at designing a mobile phone interface as Apple has. It is called attention to detail. As a former loyal T-Mobile customer, do you think I was happy about having to switch to AT&T for an iPhone? I weighed my decision carefully, and like a mature adult, I made an informed choice. I am not sitting around with my old crappy UNLOCKED Motorola V3x with an indecipherable interface, whining about how the choices presented to me are not the choices I want. Would you be any happier if Apple simply decided not to develop the iPhone at all?
Some people just want to find any reason to complain.
My choices are not:
* Buy iPhone from AT&T in the USA
OR
* Move to Europe and get some other cell phone there.
My choices ARE:
* Buy iPhone from AT&T in the USA
OR
* Buy much crappier smartphone, also with 2 year contract with some carrier I may or may not like
OR
* Buy utilitarian phone, also with a 2 year contract so that the phone is subsidized.
I bought an iPhone for $399 (you know; what they *actually* cost, not $600). I don't see the big deal. My previous phone cost $150 for a "dumb" phone thru Verizon with 2 year contract, and Verizon is the devil.
Unlike most Americans, though, I'm not used to contracts because in the past I bought unlocked GSM phones from eBay and used them sans contract on Cingular (so I was actually happy to have the iPhone excuse to ditch Verizon and their crappy call quality and dropped calls at busy times). Back when the Ericsson T39 was hot, I bought it new on eBay from the UK, I think i paid $299. My next phone (4 years later) was a Samsung D50 slider that was just a little under $400. So $400 for the iPhone was no issue. I don't particularly like being stuck with a contract, but I've used AT&T before and am more than happy to stay with them for 2 years. Frankly, compared to the rest of the market, what I get for $400 is so much more than I've gotten in the past. Both my previous expensive phones were very nice and everything, but they weren't above and beyond different from the competition like the iPhone. And I've used Windows Mobile, for 2 weeks, before I got rid of the phone out of utter frustration.
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!