I saw that on their page - I wasn't as offended about the pricing differential as the post, but I was groaning during the whole verizon pitch. I wonder how much verizon paid for that placement. It felt extremely out of place and very cringy IMO.
Between the pricing reveal and the conflation of their 28GHz deployment as a standard 5G experience, it seemed like it was the iPhone sponsored by Verizon.
You do need to pass certification tests, but those are set by governments. Those tests may be defined with lots of input from industry and may be executed by institutes created by manufacturers as a group, but AFAIK, those institutes are so independent from the manufacturers that they won’t let commercial interests affect test results.
The issue with the original iPhone was that consumers were used to get a ‘free’ phone with their subscription. To do that, manufacturers need to work with a phone company.
The iPhone’s success was not a given and Steve Jobs had fairly stringent ideas about pricing. That made it hard to find a phone company to work with. IIRC, AT&T was a bit of an underdog in the market. That made them fall for Steve’s offer.
MacWorld keynote, 2007, the CEO of Cingular is given the stage at 78m23s, in front of a giant Cingular logo. He leaves the stage at 84m23s, in front of a pair of Cingular and AT&T logos. So that's precisely 6 minutes on stage, out of precisely 80 minutes total.
In the 71-minute iPhone 12 keynote, the CEO of Verizon is brought on stage at 15m55s, and speaks until Tim boots him at 19m55s. So that's precisely 4 minutes on stage. Additionally, millimeter-wave 5G is given airtime, but says Verizon's product title for that a total of 5 seconds only.
ps. All iPhones offer carrier branding in the top-left corner of the screen when cellular service is active and control center is open (non-notch phones may not need to open control center).
There’s no reason for Apple to sell out now, except for being a sell out. It’s a shameful look for Apple.
Realistically, its a pandemic where they already delayed production and apple probably didn't have anything else big finished to present besides typical camera upgrades and a new body.
Or apple-cynically, apple stopped innovating and the iphone is now just playing catch up to android blah blah blah.
My guess is either buildout commitments or prioritisation for iPhones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_USB_Mouse#Design_and_cri...