iPhone

Carriers: The Destruction of the iPhone’s Perfection

By Douglas Bell ⋅ July 7, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

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If there’s something that we know about Apple, especially within the past ten years, it’s that they strive for perfection in their products, and while they don’t always get there, they certainly put out the effort to get pretty darn close. From the design, look, and feel of the product itself to the functionality of the product (yes, products that actually work are always good things to have) to the elegance and ease-of-use of the product, and even down to the way that the product is packaged, you can just feel that Apple has tried its best to squeeze not just a working product into the box, but a perfect all-around experience. It’s no wonder that watching unboxing videos of Apple’s products is so much fun.

The iPhone is no different, because Apple spent two and a half years perfecting the iPhone to get it ready for presentation, and another six months beyond that getting it ready for sale back in 2007. Regardless of how you feel about working on a screen that small with only an imaginary touch keyboard, there’s no denying that you can feel that Apple worked hard to make its multi-touch interface as perfect as it could so that it could get out of your way. Add to that the beautiful integration of the phone’s apps and the awesome way that it actually correctly syncs stuff with your computer, and you’ve got a nice device. But at the same time, it’s Apple’s very careful attention to the basic details that show how much work they do, and so many people have talked about all of these things that I really don’t need to go into more detail.

Yet, at the same time, I have continually been an iPhone naysayer for a number of reasons. Granted, it’s the first phone that I’d be willing to do stuff on other than calling other phones, and with the recent iPhone 3G announcement coupled with the App Store, I really have run out of things to say about the device. But unfortunately, the iPhone has one weakness that brings one major stain to the consumer experience: and even one that Apple can do little about: it’s a cell phone.

In the future, when archaeologists dig up our remains and discover more about our history, they’re probably going to wonder about us in a couple of ways: they’re going to wonder why we didn’t have universal health care, why we didn’t have free, open wi-fi in every major metropolitan area nationwide, and why we had cell phone companies charging for the crazy plans that we have now. In most cases, cell phone companies (or the predominant ones, anyway, like AT&T and Verizon in the U.S., Rogers in Canada, etc.) are simply old twentieth century phone companies that discovered this new 21st century cell phone technology and decided to sell it by using old twentieth-century techniques. I mean, why else would you be forced to sign two-year contracts for (in my opinion) prohibitively expensive plans that limit you to a certain number of minutes, and even charge you minutes for checking your own voicemail? Oh, and if you’re going to be doing any kind of web data with your device, better start counting those megabytes! All of those limitations, and yet I can’t find a decent plan anywhere for less than $40/month?

Granted, that kind of crappy service probably is a perfect match for the crappy cell phones that predated the iPhone, but the iPhone is a different beast. It’s a phone that deserves a plan with unlimited data because it actually makes it possible for a human to use the web on the go, and between Mail, Safari, YouTube, iTunes, and all of the other incoming App Store apps that the new iPhone will be using, you’re going to need that data. It deserves Visual Voicemail because it’s the first one that has the hardware necessary to let you have enough control over your voice messages to be able to treat them like e-mail (and without wasting minutes calling it up, I might add). It truly is a different phone, because it truly is a computer that happens to have a phone built in. But because that phone is built-in, that makes it subject to the need for a cell phone carrier, and that’s where Apple’s perfection breaks down.

It is true that Apple has been able to come up with some new ideas to loosen the networks’ traditional stronghold on cell phone sales. While many carriers end up taking control of about half of a phone’s software functionality, the iPhone feels like a pure Apple product. And, similarly to how the Intel Macs don’t have an “Intel Inside” sticker, the iPhone doesn’t have an AT&T logo or anything emblazoned on it. Apple has also actually figured out how to improve the activation experience. Forget having to set the phone up and all that stuff in a store or calling a service rep up on the phone, just buy the iPhone the same way you’d buy an iPod and set it up online yourself in a setup system that actually works.

But there’s still plenty of room for the carrier to gum up Apple’s offering. First off is that darned two-year contract, which makes it quite difficult for people to switch over from their old phone to the iPhone, and difficult further for some to be willing to commit to the device. Add further the fact that the cost of the plan under the contract (starting at $70/month for the new iPhone 3G), and that’s over $1500 you’ll be shelling out over the next two years, in addition to the high cost of the phone. As I noted in my previous article on MacFocus Magazine, halving the price of the iPhone may be beneficial, but having AT&T bump up the price of the service by $10/month actually adds to the existing cost of the iPhone. And even then, cell phone companies still can find ways to muck it up, from preventing Apple initially from permitting developers on the iPhone to sending out 300-page bills.

This has been none too apparent this past weekend with the news coming from Canada over the new iPhone rate plans from Rogers, which show just how absolutely ridiculous it is for this kind of new technology to be dictated by the outdated ways of these phone companies. In a way, it’s kind of unfortunate that Apple couldn’t make a cell phone carrier service as innovative as they’ve made MobileMe as a web service.

And so, it’s for this very reason that I’m not getting an iPhone. Yes, it’s now perfect in just about every way, but it’s locked onto AT&T (why, Apple, couldn’t you sell an unlocked version?), at a prohibitively expensive high monthly rate that few teenagers can afford, and for a two-year contract, besides. Maybe someday, when either the iPhone is granted more freedom to roam with (pun intended), or when the major cell carriers start to develop some more brains in their thick skulls, I’ll be more compelled to shell out for an iPhone. But until the rate plan side of the iPhone package gets somewhat better, iCan’t.

Tags: Apple, AT&T, carrier, iPhone, rate plans, rogers