What are Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T going to do? If you’re Apple do you think they’re going to be willing to do lots of promotion with you? You’re now a direct competitor.
Maybe they’ll take you out of their stores. Maybe they’ll raise the price. Maybe they’ll just push other phones REALLY hard. Your sales are going to go down no matter what.
It’s nice you on the whole network, but now you have to support all these other phones. Do you think Apple Mobile wants to be in the business of selling in supporting Android phones? Maybe they kicked everyone off, maybe they just try and encourage people to move over to the Apple side of the fence. Either way you’re losing customers.
Your sales are down. Your customer count in mobile is down. The carriers are as mad at you or worse than they were when you first came around and suddenly had a lot of power. Your network isn’t good enough so the people who do stick with you or move to you aren’t going to have a great time because you simply don’t have a really big network. It’s going to take A LOT of time and money to fix that. You have money, but will people be willing to wait around?
If Apple wanted to do this they would’ve had to do it years ago when the iPhone with still relatively new.
And again, I don’t see the DOJ ever letting Apple do this. Ignoring questions of political goodwill towards Apple (which is VERY short), it would be a giant shake up of the mobile market.
Let’s say it works. Let’s say they’re allowed to actually buy T-Mobile. Now what? Is Google going to try and buy a carrier? We already know that Comcast wants to be in the cell phone game, are they going to try and buy a cell phone maker?
The stupidly large companies that shouldn’t be getting larger by taking over other industries problem will just continue.
I really like Apple. I do not want this to happen. And for the reasons above I don’t think they will do it.