thepete.comnewsweek:
“The truth is, Apple needs to get on Verizon, and fast, or it risks losing customers to Android. If Verizon gets the iPhone, I’d expect a huge exodus from AT&T. Which probably explains some of AT&T’s recent behavior. With the release of iPhone 4, AT&T made an unusual offer to current owners of iPhones, telling them that even if their contracts weren’t close to being over, they could still push up their expiration date and upgrade to the iPhone 4—as long as they signed a new two-year contract. Many people jumped on that offer, and some even viewed it as a case of AT&T being generous. Um, not likely. More likely it’s that AT&T knows its exclusive lock on iPhone is coming to an end, and so it sought to lock in as many iPhone users before the deal with Verizon happens. To those folks who waited in line for hours and hours to take advantage of AT&T’s “generous” offer, I can only offer my condolences and point out that, given AT&T’s past behavior, you should have known better.”
—
Lyons, on the latest Verizon iPhone rumors
Oooor they might just want to stay with a carrier (and a phone) that they can use on other SIM-based networks. When I heard the Verizon rumor, I thought: “Do I want to switch to Verizon? And get stuck with Verizon forever? Not really…”
Just my ¥2, of course.
via life.thepete.com
Meant to post this here first, but Tumblr was tweaking on the bookmarklet. Ah well.
Personally, I’m getting sick of this contract shit. It’s just a con-game. I’m sick of letting myself become a slave to a wireless plan. Just let me pay as I go—some months I don’t need wireless, some months I do. We’re all being taken advantage of by a bunch of white guys in suits.
Why do we put up with this crap? It’s like we’re only worthy of experiencing innovation if we’re rich enough. I’m fine with paying for things, but it seems to me that the profit margin is so crazy high. I get that they should make money, don’t get me wrong. The thing is, the whole system could be a lot more fair than it is. The big communication companies could be making a less money per person from way more people if they’d give people more the freedom to choose who they want to be with. I want to ask each big telecom one question: Do you want the industry to be healthy? Or just YOU?
And they can’t answer “just me” since that is anti-American, anti-competition and flies in the face of basic concepts that we built our economy on (that competition fuels innovation). If anything tells us that innovation isn’t being fueled, it’s Apple’s mobile industry business plan.
Let’s release a phone with 10x the design of most other phones, but with 1/5th the features. The phone is capable of doing the same things [as hackers have proven] but we’ll make sure the software won’t allow it. This way, we can offer a better phone a year later that will cost us next to nothing to develop but we’ll get rich giving people what pure innovation would have allowed us to give them in the first place.
Aka: release a hobbled phone, then partially unhobble it and pretend it’s a whole new product, then repeat!
It took four iterations of the iPhone for Apple to actually give us something we can’t get anywhere else—their new retina display thingy. Of course, the iPhone 4 is NOT a 4G phone. So, it’s still a hobbled phone. Where can you get a 4G phone? Sprint—or any number of countries that aren’t in America.
OK, I could keep this rant going for a while, so I’ll just stop it there on the assumption you get my point.
– Download Were AT&T’s overtures to current iPhone users a precursor to a Verizon iPhone? as PDF –