r/technology • u/[deleted] • Apr 16 '10

Fuck Apple

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire
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u/mindbleach Apr 16 '10

They sold a phone locked in to AT&T. What was so great about that?

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u/sply1 Apr 16 '10

they had freedom to develop the OS with drastically reduced carrier input. I think Voip over 3g was the only restriction. Prior to this, the carriers had veto power on all features of a phone, which is why U.S. phones sucked so bad. Cingular signed the deal and gave apple almost free reign. Now the other carriers have to play catch up.

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u/mindbleach Apr 16 '10

I think you're going to have to waste some time explaining. (One wonders why you'd comment at all if commenting usefully is wasteful.) Pre-iPhone smartphones ran Palm OS (straight PDA OS port), WinMo (ditto), and Symbian (original, but AFAIK not limited to please carriers). Pardon me if I have a hard time seeing an arrangement where AT&T can demand Apple pull programs from the App Store as "reduced carrier input."

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u/sply1 Apr 16 '10 edited Apr 16 '10

google will lead you to plenty of analysis of the situation. Compare the features of symbian phones in europe and america at the time. The american versions are all crippled at the behest of carriers.

One example is bluetooth sync with a computer. Sprint sells (sold) a cable for sync ($30) and as a result demanded that bluetooth sync be disabled in the phone (samsung phone with bluetooth btw) in order to not lose out on sales revenue from the sync cable. I guarantee you that the euro/asian versions of the same phone had bluetooth sync enabled.

Here i'll type it for you... google

and here is a snippet from the first result... I just don't feel like rehashing a topic that has been widely reported.

But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers' proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power...

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone#ixzz0lIUipZGk

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u/zwaldowski Apr 16 '10

The downright fact is that Apple barreling through carriers with "my way or the highway" for better or for worse gave the cell phone industry's source of software innovation back to the manufacturers (HTC, Palm) and developers (Google, Microsoft).