Apple Broke My iPhone, and Their Policies Prevent Them from Fixing It

> Apple won't help me because they agreed to block on-device APN editing for certain carriers, including AT&T, even though this negatively impacts people who are not direct customers of AT&T, and even though there is not one single other unlocked GSM phone model on the market besides iPhone that imposes this restriction on users or hands over this kind of control to carriers.

Unless I'm misunderstanding your argument. Are you suggesting that Apple is beholden to _all_ of the carriers severally now, because of risk of losing their dominant slice of marketshare?

You've always been able to buy an unlocked phone with no crapware and no restrictions. The problem with the iPhone is that even the unlocked phones are restricted and locked-down, which is a first.

It seems to me that given this fact, there really is no reason why Apple has to continue to kowtow to the carriers. Apple should stop sucking up to them and push direct sales of unlocked phones harder than ever. People will still buy them. They should then show a complete and fearless disregard for carriers by discarding the concessions they have made to them in the hardware and software design. Just throw stuff like carrier profile restriction features completely out. Sell iPhones to and for your end-users again.

If Apple decided to actually do this, what could any of the carriers really do about it? Nothing, that's what. Ban the iPhone from their networks? They wouldn't dare. (Or at least the GSM ones wouldn't...IS-95/CDMA2K is a slightly stickier subject, I'll admit.) There always seems to be a lot of talk (especially State-side) about carriers being open-access and what that means (remember the rider on the 700MHz auctions that Google convinced the FCC to sneak in which Verizon is now bound to as the winner of that spectrum block?), but GSM carriers have always mostly been "open" with respect to devices. Part of the promise of the SIM "personality module" is that it brings to the wireless industry what modular plugs in the home brought to the wireline industry following events such as the FCC's Carterphone ruling: a decoupling of the carrier and the end-user's device. I want to see the wireless industry move in that exact same direction. Sure, AT&T could decide to block iPhones from their network, but then they'd be turning down revenue from potential customers solely out of spite, and they aren't going to do that.

So far, the only company to have the balls to pursue a strategy like this, surprisingly, is Google. For some time now, you've been able to buy an unlocked Galaxy Nexus phone from them at a very reasonable price, and the Nexus 4 continues that tradition and even goes a step further: the ONLY sales channel (at least at this time) for the Nexus 4 is direct from Google. There are no subsidized or carrier-locked versions of this phone sold through carriers. There's a single SKU (well two, really, if you count the two fixed storage capacity options) for an unlocked GSM/UMTS phone. Google may have consulted with AT&T and T-Mobile here in the States out of courtesy before releasing the phone; I don't know. But I don't think that there's anything that says they had to get their approval to make and sell the phone, and there's nothing that says a user can't buy one without consulting their carrier first and put their own SIM card in it once it arrives.

Some may point out that Google isn't moving very many phones by themselves at the moment with this sales system, so doesn't that prove that this is not a viable business plan? I would counter that Google doesn't have quite the cachet that Apple does in this market at this time for reasons completely unrelated to how phones are sold, and that Apple, unlike Google, is in a position right now where it hold all of the cards. And for the sake of the consumer, Apple should take advantage of that position. That they don't appear to be ready and willing to do this (and in fact seem to be trending in the opposite direction) worries me.

I definitely salute Google for their move, and wish other phone manufacturers would follow in their footsteps. C'mon guys: take your destiny into your own hands rather than leave it in the trust of the carriers. Seriously.

However, they still make you specify your carrier (at&t/verizon/sprint). So, you are getting a carrier-flavored version when you buy an iPad in the US and it is only unlocked for travel?

That is terrible. I am vexed.

Not true. Japan has the dubious honor of being the only country with locked iPads. Of Japan country-coded SIMs, they will only work with the single official carrier in the country due to a software lock. They still get to say 'unlocked' though, but the devices only work on overseas networks, not other compatible networks in the same country.

You thereby have to frame these kinds of things inside of the larger framework: you can't just say "oh yeah, Apple is evil because they are allowing this FaceTime charge thing" unless you are willing to also accept things like "everyone should be paying more for bandwidth" or "users should be paying for bandwidth in much smaller slices": this is a complex issue.

Please speak for yourself: I pay much more than this, by choice (to get higher bandwidth caps). (For the record, I also "put my money where my mouth is", and immediately called AT&T when they started phasing out of unlimited data plans and opted myself out of that plan to the limited one. This has meant that on some months I pay much more than I used to, but it has also meant that on many months I pay less; it also means that I no longer am contributing to a systemic bias against disruptive-ish services like FaceTime or Netflix.)

> Compare it to Cable Internet. You are capable of receiving impressive speeds during low use time and your experience will suffer during high use time. Same with cell phone data.

This only argues for peak vs. off-peak pricing being different. In fact, I specifically cover this in my talk with an analogy to how electricity is billed. It simply makes obvious sense that if, in the middle of the night, bandwidth is nearly free due to unused infrastructure, yet during the day it is a spare commodity, that bandwidth should be priced differently during the night than it is during the day. Hell, even our cellular telephone service is billed in this way: it just makes sense.

> And you take into account that an average home user will use much, MUCH more data than what cell phone companies are charging their $30 on.

You seem to believe (not just with this sentence, but with most of your argument) that data should cost the same whether it comes over a wire or via a cellular connection: the costs simply aren't the same for numerous reasons ranging across the board from the technical to the political. (This includes some less-obvious ones, such as how no one wants a cell tower in their neighborhood, yet everyone wants good cell service: I discuss this particular issue in my talk along with some humorous slides.)

> We're not talking about what the probability of what a customer would or COULD use, we're talking about actual amounts.

No, actually: we have to talk about the probability of what a customer would use, as to do anything else is to price yourself out of the market. Again, I go into detail on this in my talk, using an analogy involving salt, but in this case, if AT&T charged for the actual bandwidth on the label it would be trivial for competitors like Verizon to undercut them by just noticing "hey, our average usage is for half of what we are charging, so there's a ton of overhead in our margin we can give back to the customer". Carriers, like most other almost entirely fungible commodity (they really are a "dumb pipe" with only minor differences in quality or locality), are in fierce pricing competition.

> Why? Maybe you could compare it to satellite based Internet. Satellite has fixed bandwidths and astronomically expensive equipment and that's all it does it provide Internet service. But, why would you compare it to satellite based? All a cell carrier does is get it back to a tower a maximum of 5 miles away. There they pay for land based Internet pipes.

Again, you seem to be entirely discounting the cost of those towers, both in terms of infrastructure and equipment and in terms of land; you also seem to be discounting the concern of limited frequency space, and the fierce competitions that occur to obtain it from the auction system we have for selling it off. If you want really cheap bandwidth, get a land-line: as you say, they exist.

And yes: even satellite internet may be cheaper in many circumstances; if nothing else, you have to take into consideration that most of the carrier plans people look at and compare are smart-phone subsidy contracts, which means that you are paying much much more than if you were willing to accept that, in fact, that iPhone or Android device in your pocket should have cost $500-$600. For some stupid reason, people get sticker shock at a large investment in hardware, but are willing to just whine about service costs.

> So, I simply ask, if you support a pay as you go model for cell phone providers, what price per MB do you have in mind? Because right now, it highway-frickin'-robery and they're still whining about data usage.

This question doesn't really matter; in essence, you are asking it because you feel that the carriers are drastically overcharging for a service that you somehow believe you can get from your cable provider, and thereby are certain that in a per-kB world the price will somehow be even more ludicrously expensive.

My contention is that the core issue here isn't price: it is poor incentives; the carriers are incentivized right now to hate data, as they are billing for it in an incorrect unit, leading to all kinds of weird pressures in seemingly-unrelated parts of the ecosystem, such as the old rule the iTunes App Store used to have on applications that used "too much" bandwidth (this was thankfully dismantled when AT&T stopped offering "unlimited" bandwidth pricing): you simply wouldn't have those horrible incentives under per-kB pricing.

Meanwhile, I am fairly certain that, based on the rather poor profit margins I see when I look at the financial statements released by carriers, combined with how fierce they seem to be to jump onto pricing models that aren't even sustainable in the long term yet give them temporary advantages over their competitors, that whatever the price that ends up coming out of this will be mostly fair. More expensive than cable? Well, duh. But, more expensive than now? Only if the customers suck and change their behaviors because of it; otherwise, when you have better pricing models things actually tend to get cheaper for normal people (as they did for 95% of customers when AT&T stopped running their unlimited data pricing plan).

It's not so much an "unofficial workaround" as a mandatory component of the unlocked device.

If you put in a SIM card that the iPhone has no clue about (such as T-Mobile U.S.)., then iOS will fall back to a generic carrier profile, which does allow access to the APN editing submenu.

The problem is that Straight Talk is an AT&T MVNO, and so Straight Talk SIMs are indistinguishable from AT&T SIM cards from the iPhone's perspective. The iPhone engineers made a bad assumption, which is that all cards issued by carrier X should be treated exactly the same.

1) iOS does ship with a collection of the latest versions of partner carrier profiles as of the ship-date of that iOS version, as you point out. So you can't try to do an end-run around the AT&T profile restrictions by, say, doing a complete restore of iOS on your phone, followed by activation of the phone using a SIM that isn't from a carrier partner in order to cause it to use the generic carrier profile (for example, T-Mobile U.S.), followed by SIM-swapping back to your AT&T SIM. The AT&T profile is lurking in there, ready to be consulted when you switch SIMs, on every iPhone.

2) This is still a proprietary Apple scheme for pushing APNs for carriers (carrier profiles are plists), and not some universal standard for doing carrier programming updates "over the air." Carriers can build and submit their carrier profiles to Apple, but Apple then centrally distributes the profile updates from their own servers. And AFAIK, if you're a carrier, Apple is not going to host a carrier profile for you unless you have some formal relationship with Apple (become a "supported" carrier).

In my case (and in the case of some other customers of other MVNOs), my carrier, Straight Talk, is really just a company that buys wholesale access to AT&T's network and then resells it as a prepaid service to customers. Thus a Straight Talk SIM card looks identical to an AT&T SIM card to the iPhone. And AT&T's iOS carrier profile blocks access to the APN editing submenu. So my situation is different from yours because in your case, your Brazilian service provider and your European service providers had no corporate connections with each other, nor did they share a singular common network, as is the case with AT&T and Straight Talk.

There is next-to-nothing Straight Talk can do about this, at least without both AT&T's and Apple's co-operation.