Sipping the AT&T Haterade: Why the iPhone 3G May Not Win Fans
by
on June 10, 2008,
Yesterday, I tuned in to no fewer than three liveblogs for the announcement of the phone I've been waiting for: the 3G iPhone. Last year I even replaced my Motorola RAZR at the unsubsidized price just so I could get the iPhone 3G when they finally came out with one, so yesterday's announcement had me darn near hysteria.
Today, however, the dust has settled. And Apple and AT&T may just have conspired to lose themselves a customer who was willing to buy a $400 phone with a silly business model and a little too much greed. How does a company like Apple, with some of the most loyal users, manage to alienate so many of those users?
For starters, Apple is so beyond paranoid about their big announcements that they have failed to educate most of the customer service reps on activation policies and rate plans. Depending on which customer rep or spokesperson you get information from, the information changes, leaving users wondering what is going on. To prevent the number of phones being unlocked and used on other carriers, iPhone 3G buyers are required to go into a store to buy the phone so that the mandatory two-year contract with AT&T is activated at time of purchase. That demonstrates no trust. I'm already an AT&T customer. I already have a data plan. It's not like I'm suddenly going to jump ship to one of the other useless carriers in my area. Yet Apple and AT&T don't trust me enough to let me buy the phone and activate it from home, meaning I'm going to be dragging four children into a store to get the phone and activate it. And I'm warning you; I'll be sure they are hungry to make the experience as painful as possible. Customer loyalty is already waning.
Next up? A rate plan change. I use my cell a lot, but not nearly as much as I use the data plan. As someone noted, I appear to be online most of the time, but a lot of that is reading news and IMing and using Twitter from my cell phone. I rely on my phone to keep me connected when I can't use my laptop, which is why I was so intent on waiting for 3G. My husband rarely uses his as a phone. The result is that we don't use an awful lot of minutes, and have been able to exist on the Nation 550 Plan, with Rollover Minutes to spare. According to yet another nameless spokesperson, I'm going to have to upgrade to a minimum of the Nation 700 plan, which is also going up $10 a month. Say what? Add in the fact that I lose my Rollover Minutes when I change rate plans and AT&T wants me to pay them a LOT of money. If those 2800 Rollover Minutes I've accumulated (and which do get used some months) are worth the same $0.10 a minute that the new plan rate assumes, AT&T is charging me $280.00 for allowing me to get the Jesus Phone.
And that's not all, folks. The data plan is going up as well. I'm currently paying $19.99 a month for my unlimited data plan, which includes 200 SMS in that amount. The new data plan? $29.99, which is another $10 a month more. Is this how they are making up the subsidy? Because I'd MUCH rather pay the extra $200 on the front end, thank you very much.
All this for a phone that still doesn't have full Bluetooth capabilities. Or video. Or a better camera. And then Apple is going to want me to pay for some of those nifty new apps they'll be helping developers to sell, pocketing a neat 30%. I'm not feeling like much of a loyal customer right now, and I'm hoping that most of this is just a slew of miscommuncations due to under-educated "spokespeople." Because a Nokia N95 on T-Mobile is looking a little better. Especially since it comes in purple.
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Svetlana Gladkova
Bighorn
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
You are preaching to the choir with this one. I am SUCH an apple loyalist and I refuse to get an iPhone as long as it is under AT&T. REFUSE. It just isn’t worth it. Good article.
I agree that the plan changes suck… Add to that the fact that AT&T is no longer paying a portion back to Apple, and I think it’s time to buy AT&T stock.
However much the plan change sucks, however…. It’s an iPhone with 3G and GPS… my technolust knows no bounds… It will be mine! Oh yes, it will be mine!
Isn’t it amazing that with all those faults that the rest of the phone industry can’t make a device that competes with the iPhone? That they have been at it for 10 years and utterly failed to bring the web to mobile? That they have been so deep in the carrier conspiracy that they failed to produce a unified application store for their phones?
It is no wonder Apple is going to win the smart phone fight (at least on the consumer side, the enterprise side remains to be seen). The competition has been bungling it for years.
There’s still a month before they’re available so that’s enough time to train customer service. And, no matter what the deal is, this is a far better phone than a Razr. I hate my Razr. Worst OS ever, screen is unreadable in daylight, buttons are terrible.
One other point… The next greatest hope for savvy cell shoppers who want more than just a phone is Google’s Android. Android based phones aren’t scheduled till next year… I think they took a little too long, and the iPhone is going to crush most of the rest of the industry before then. It’s going to be tough to break into that market, just like it’s tough for anyone to unseat the iPod.
That’s where the cheaper handset price / more expensive monthly bill is genius. Something like 80% of people who decided not to get an original iPhone did so based on price… Well, now it’s roughly 1/2 as much to get started, plus it’s faster, has GPS, etc.
As the Cobra Kai would say… “Game over, man! Game over!”
Does anyone know if the AT&T Voice/Data plans include text messaging? If not, that is an additional $5-$0 per month I would think. That would bring the total cost upto atleast $70+/month for the most basic plan (plus, additional taxes and fees)
I believe they come with 200 SMS messages / month
A website has confirmed that SMS text messaging is no longer bundled with Voice/Data plan for 3G IPhone
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/06/10/iphone-3g-sms-text-messages-no-longer-bundled/
Nice rant Cyndy but - you and I both know damn well that you WILL be getting the new iPhone. Once you have had an iPhone you could never make do with a Nokia. Agreed?
-Sanjay
It’s been a day after the iPhone 3G has been released, and I haven’t seen any official plan listings on either the Apple site OR the AT&T site. I’d just wait for the official release before you trust a blogger.
@Leslie Thanks!
@Grendel And is that an employer-paid contract there?
@Sam, agreed, and as Grendel points out in a second comment, Google is so far behind with Android at this point it will be next to impossible to catch up.
@Martin They better move fast, because the miscommunications are spreading like wildfire online, and bad PR is hard to combat once it’s ingrained, as you well know. Also, which RAZR do you have? My husband’s is teh suck but I have a V3xx and like it. It’s much improved over my previous RAZR.
@Sanjay I saw that on the alleged AT&T memo. Have to see it. This whole price hike thing PLUS losing my Rollover minutes really has me ticked.
@elby Honestly? Unless things change I seriously don’t want one now. I don’t hate my RAZR enough to ditch it. I didn’t get the first version because I like my 3G too much to let it go, and I’m not about to pay all that for a phone I won’t even be able to use in the car because of the NY hands-free law (Bluetooth headset, Apple? Hello?). Apple has done just enough to me in the past year to have soured me as a diehard fan girl, and this is icing on that cake.
@anonymous The horror! Some bloggers do actually check sources, you know.
I honestly don’t think AT&T knows what on earth is going on right now. Considering that virtually every feature of the 3G iPhone was leaked ahead of time, I think Steverino could have let them go ahead and get their ducks in a row when it came to the rate plans. I’m not the only person who is deciding against the Holy Grail of phones due to the insane rate hikes (if the SMS bit is true, that’s what? over $90 more PER MONTH on my plan? No thank you.
I was willing to rush out and buy an iPhone and then go get a job to pay for the $60 a month service. But now its a hell of a lot more then that and if they take the txting away then I am going to stick to my verizon phone. No matter how much I hate verizon and their mony grubing ness It is still cheeper and has better coverage then AT&T.
I have an individual plan with 1000+ rollover minutes. I was hoping to get another line and switch to 550 minute family plan, but it looks like that plan is not available any longer for iPhone. I spoke to a AT&T CSR and she confirmed that if I make a switch to a family plan I could rollover minutes equal to family plan maximum free minutes. So if I go for 700 minute family plan I will only get 700 minutes rolled over.
I don’t think I’m ready to pay $110+ for family plan and still loose my 300+ rollover minutes.
Great post. You make me think hard about getting an iPhone when my contract ends with Verizon in September. I’m hoping that one of the new LGs will catch my eye. I currently have an iPod Touch which I do love though wish there was more free wifi around to use it in more places. Also, the Touch should have a camera in it as well and since the iPhone starts at $199 the Touch will have to be less…at least that would make sense.
I still have the summer to watch and see what happens with smartphones and whether I wait for the iPhone 3.0.
@net625 See, that’s my problem. I have a RAZR that works perfectly well, does most of the things that the iPhone would do, and I have pricing that is a lot less per month. I’m not so into gadgets that I NEED to upgrade, and for me, the iPhone is essentially free if they let us use our gift cards.
@Gaurav The loss of the rollover minutes is what is particularly galling to me. I probably could have talked myself into the bigger monthly bill, but not when I see those rollover minutes get washed right down the drain.
@Ellen I had a friend thinking about getting the iPhone, but got a touch instead for that very reason. It LOOKS cheaper, but when you factor in the bill, it’s sick. People should also check to see if they even have 3G coverage in their area; a lot do, so they are essentially paying for service they can’t take advantage of. Another check mark in the “cons” column, and I love the double meaning of that word in this instance.