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June 9, 2008

TCO ()

by fluffy at 9:06 PM
  • iPhone 1.0 (8GB, retail), full contract lifetime, minimal contract plan: $400 + 24*$60 = $1840
  • iPhone 3G (8GB), full contract lifetime, minimal contract plan: $200 + 24*$70 = $1880
  • iPhone 1.0 (8GB, eBay), full contract lifetime, minimal contract plan: $600 + 24*$60 = $2040
Not really sure why people are turning to eBay to buy the inferior product to save $10/month. Of course people are kind of dumb and tend to focus on only one aspect.

That said, I hope there's still a pay-as-you-go option (according to AT&T the $200 is still the full retail price, and not a subsidized cost, although that smells like bullcrap to me), but it sounds like there won't be (since all purchases/activation will happen in-store and so they probably won't even let you buy an iPhone if you cause your credit check to fail). Or, perhaps there's a way to opt to only get EDGE for $10/month less.

Comments

#10952 06/09/2008 09:29 pm
I don't know how much you trust TUAW but http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/09/confirmed-gophone-is-no-go-and-in-store-activation-only/
#10953 06/09/2008 09:34 pm
Well, disappointing but unsurprising. Oh well. I'll still probably get one when they're available. Although I really don't look forward to having to, you know, go to a store and wait in line and whatever.
#10954 06/09/2008 09:42 pm
Well, as far as TUAW's reliability goes, at least some of their writers didn't get the message that it's not out for another month.
#10956 06/09/2008 11:28 pm well, that rules me out
I won't be stuck in another 2 year contract.
#10957 06/09/2008 11:33 pm
I'm sure the price on the 1.0 will come down soon enough, and hopefully the old PAYG plan will still be available.
#10958 06/10/2008 04:42 am
I was sort of considering buying a 3G iPhone for my California trip, but I forgot Apple would pull this kind of bullshit. Nokia never looked so good.
#10959 06/10/2008 09:09 am
Why not just use your Eee? It's easy enough to find free WiFi around here. Or were you looking for a new cellphone?

In this case I don't think it's Apple's bullshit so much as AT&T's, although to be fair it's Apple's original bullshit which set the stage for AT&T's bullshit seeming like a reasonable thing to do from their perspective.

I don't particularly mind the contract, I just mind not being able to say "hey I really don't need 600 minutes a month" or whatever the base plan is. It feels wasteful, although I can't help but wonder if the excess minutes are there to subsidize the extreme amounts of bandwidth that a typical iPhone user uses. When Verizon rolled out their unlimited data at $80/mo they were assuming pathological usage pattern (and later added in more features to try to get people to actually use $80 worth of data per month), but when iPhone came around, AT&T was still used to people using maybe 2-3MB/mo but on the iPhone you can easily breeze through that in just a few minutes.

(I also wonder how much my $6.99/mo T-Mobile data plan was actually costing T-Mobile when I used Google Maps constantly on my EDGE phone.)

(Of course I also wonder how much the data airtime actually "costs" them to begin with. It's not like even heavy cellphone use will even remotely tax their upstream costs, and in reality the cost of airtime is really just an approximate way of prorating their fixed maintenance and infrastructure costs. So you'd think they'd actually want MORE users, in order to bring their per-user costs DOWN, but...)