Apple has come under fire for making its iPhone too good… This Financial Times article argues that the difference between the technological capability of mobile phones and the capability of the networks they run on means that consumers will inevitably be disappointed by the experience. “Even if Apple’s Safari browser looks good, it will be frustrating to use unless the owner is in a WiFi hotspot (the iPhone has a WiFi card). Apple has not even bothered to link its iTunes music service to the cellular network: iPhone owners must download songs at home…Apple will presumably launch the iPhone elsewhere on 3G networks: it would be eccentric not to. That will improve things but the network will remain the bottleneck. Even the best cellular data services are far slower and costlier to use than those found at home or in the office.” This is true, but it’s hardly Apple’s fault. If anything, giving customers the ability to use WiFi is a big leap forward in connectivity. The article goes on to say that Steve Jobs has designed the iPhone so that Apple will make money from selling devices and AT&T will profit from voice — which is criticized as being similar to the way the mobile industry operates.
“It is akin to a carmaker selling an expensive vehicle that is capable of going very fast and fixing it so that motorists have to pay more to get into fourth gear and cannot shift into fifth gear at all. Drivers would not tolerate that and I do not think that iPhone users should.” This is ridiculous, and not just because iPhone users will likely accept any restrictions Jobs seeks to impose on them. First, the analogy would be better said this way: It’s like a carmaker selling an expensive vehicle that goes very fast to customers forced to drive on roads with a lower speed limit. It’s far more analogous, particularly because it notes that the manufacturers can’t make the network operate any faster. The article criticizes Jobs for forcing users to download songs at home or via WiFi and then criticizes him for having the iPhone run on networks that are far slower then cable broadband, as if he had any choice in the matter. AT&T’s data network may not be the fastest in the US, but as the article points out any network will be slow compared to fixed line.
The article goes on to say that people are “boycotting non-text data services”, which is a complete misuse of the word boycott.
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