“Steve Jobs made no secret of his disdain for wireless carriers,” Steve Wildstrom writes for Tech.pinions. “In 2005, when Apple was still denying any interest in getting into the phone business, Jobs sneered at the four major U.S. carriers as the ‘four orifices’ through which the wireless business passed. With the launch of the original iPhone, Apple made a concerted, but failed, effort to change how the wireless carriers did business by getting AT&T to sell the phone without a subsidy.”
“Jobs had to make a peace of sorts with the carriers because that was the only way to get the iPhone into the hands of customers,” Wildstrom writes. “But now he seems to be wreaking posthumous revenge on his old foes.”
Wildstrom writes, “The problem is simple. The carriers are selling tons of iPhones. and Apple is collecting all the profit… There’s not a lot carriers can do about it. The original deal Apple offered in 2007 was almost certainly better for them. Apple relented after AT&T pushed to renegotiate the deal and, more important, additional carriers outside the U.S. refused to go along with Apple’s terms. The carriers got what they wanted, and now they are paying the price, having yielded control to Apple over pricing, branding, apps. and just about everything else in the customer experience.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s revolutionary iPhone (brings record subscriber gains to carriers).
Ask T-Mobile USA how life’s treating them sans iPhone.
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