It’s been a busy week for me in the web world. It saw Apple’s WWDC 2010, and I like most folks I know listened to it via the live stream or followed the folks live blogging it. Don’t let anyone fool you, everyone was waiting to hear what Steve Jobs had to say about the new iPhone.
I myself, like a number of people was actually expecting Steve to come out and say that Apple was opening up the iPhone to at least one more carrier, namely Verizon and doing away with the AT&T exclusivity contract that has been the bane of so many iPhone users. This however, didn’t happen. Instead, Jobs and Apple decided to extend AT&T’s exclusive contract as the sole carrier for the iPhone until 2012. Personally I think this was a big mistake on Apple’s part. .
I say this for two reason’s. One, I don’t live in a major metropolitan city like New York or Los Angeles, so AT&T’s service is spotty at best where I live. By spotty I mean it always varies where in my house I would have access to a signal to use the iPhone as just that, a phone. But even living in a metropolitan city won’t help. I was recently in San Francisco and a friend was constantly dropping calls on their iPhone or losing signal. ANd San Francisco is definitely what I would call a major metropolitan city.
So I would think Apple would insist that AT&T resolve things like weak signal strength and call drops. I have to admit that I wonder is the reason Jobs stayed with AT&T that he has a vested financial interest in the company? Does Apple? It’s just one possible answer as to why they would stay with a carrier their users are unhappy with.
The second reason being speed, and by speed I mean 4G. From what I’ve been reading lately, AT&T won’t even have their 4G network in place until next year sometime, while other carriers like Sprint are already advertising a nationwide 4G network. You would think Apple could have opened the iPhone up to at least one more carrier and quite possibly recovered some goodwill from the community at large. Not to mention it wouldn’t have hurt their profit margins at all either. But no, instead, Jobs’ “late-in-the-game” renewal of the AT&T exclusivity contract for the iPhone just goes to prove that Jobs, and by extension Apple, is not interested in listening to it’s community and what they have to say about his chosen carrier. Even John Stewart of The Daily Show remarked that AT&T makes the iPhone virtually unusable as a phone. In fact, I recently overheard someone referring to the iPhone and the “iPad Nano” because “…like the iPad, you can’t make calls on it”.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple makes some great products. But, I also think Apple is too closed of a community that doesn’t listen, and that they need to open up and start listening to their customer base. How long will it be before the Android phone starts nipping at the iPhones heels? Chances are not very long if Apple doesn’t open up and start listening. So what do you think? Did Apple make a mistake staying with AT&T? Are they too closed? Is Android poised to be the new iPhone?