More bad news on the iPhone front today. Lord Jobs unveiled the latest iteration yesterday, faster and thinner and, if possible, even purdier than before. It remains one of the loveliest consumer devices ever to grace our narrow visual spectrum, but its unholy coupling with AT&T has just become more bindingly unholy. They now require you to register with AT&T when you buy the phone, so there’s no longer any easy way to take it home and exorcise its demons.
I’ve already ranted, at some length, about the problems that Apple is bringing on itself by hitching its wagon to AT&T, so I won’t go into all that again. But I will say this — they’ve just added to another level on inconvenience and crappitude to the buying experience, forcing you to spend a quarter of an hour signing your life away to a service that is guaranteed to sell you out to the first government agency that decides to turn its lidless eye in your direction. Seriously, Apple, what the hell? You put together this beautiful bouquet, sunflowers and roses and daffodils, as lovely as it is thoughtful, and then send it to us in a box made out of dogshit and pureed cockroaches.
Meanwhile, Starbucks, my home away from home, creeps inexorably toward its vile accommodation with AT&T, slowly pushing T-Mobile1 out of the picture entirely. I guess sometimes the bad guys win.
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Although, to be fair, T-Mobile is in some sense the author of its own problems. Charging $6 an hour for internet access in 2008 is just dumb. ↩
2 comments ↓
I actually don’t understand why internet access in Starbucks isn’t free yet. With their price of coffee, they would get more than $6 hour from me in drinks alone as I sat there.
Yes, exactly. Which is what AT&T realized, I guess. You can get 2 hours free now (through AT&T) if you buy a Starbucks card and register it. An easy compromise that T-Mobile should have been pushing for years ago. Bah.
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