well, no matter what the sales are they will hit a hard rock tomm when the new iphone is announced...people tend to pay whatever to ATT for an iphone
That may not be the case for much longer because of several factors against Apple this go around.
First, AT&T's pure suckage has become common knowledge to the point Jon Stewart is mocking it. What good is a phone that can't make phone calls? You know what that is? An iPod Touch with a $140/mo. bill to use it. Add on the ridiculous data transfer caps and higher prices and there is a ton of ill will toward the carrier that is likely to remain the only source for the iPhone. Will people be willing to pay whatever the cost to get that particular phone now that there's competition? (More on this in a sec.) Only a surprise announcement that Verizon or Sprint getting it too would change the game and I don't think that's likely.
Next is the iPhone itself. Thanks to a drunk Apple engineer and some checkbook journalism, when Lord Jobs holds the think up tomorrow, no one with any tech savvy will be surprised that it looks like a tiny iPad/MacBook Pro-styled telephone. They've finally added a flash - welcome to 2008, guys! - and a front-facing camera (Nokia sends merry FUs) and a same-sized higher-rezed screen and yawn........sorry, put myself to sleep there. The unveiled iPhone OS 4 a couple of months ago and most critically, they STILL can't really multitask like any other phone OSes can and have been able to for years.
So we have an unsurprising hunk of hardware running insignificant software on a craptastic carrier. Remember the yawns when the 3GS was rolled out? It was a crucial sign that Apple was coasting because they knew they could coast and why not? They were #1 for the previous two years and they know the power of inertia both in their successes (iPod, iPhone) and failures (computers). The problem is that success came in a vacuum and now that vacuum is gone.
When the iPhone 3G was announced in June 2008, there was no such thing as an actual Android phone and no one knew that webOS was over the horizon. In June 2009, Android was making a little headway and the Pre had just dropped, but they were both too green to really threaten the Cupertino Clan. June 2010 finds a radically different playing field for Apple because Android has matured impressively in the past year to 2.1 and 2.2 is only going to make things much, much better. The Pre collapsed under the weight of poor hardware, limited dev support, and one of the worst marketing campaigns ever. Windows Phone 7 is 6 months out and unproven. Android is the only challenger to Apple and here's why: Choice.
As Google laid out at I/O, on one side is one man, one company, one phone, one carrier and on the other side is many choices of handsets, carriers, price points, form factors and sizes. What Apple seems hellbent on repeating is how they threw away their superior advantage in personal computers almost 30 years ago because of Jobs' sheer greed and control freakism. Oh, he spins it as
"providing a superior user experience" now, but it's always really been about maximizing profit and control and convincing the paying customers that being slapped around by one man/company/phone/carrier is in their best interests. I'm not so sure they're in the mood for that.
Soon Boost Mobile will have an Android phone on a pay-go, no contract, service deal; the EVO just came out and was an unqualified success - the guys at the oil change place saw me using mine while I waited and begged for a demo and both said they wanted one; Verizon has blown a ton of dough getting the whole "Droid" thing out there with the collateral benefit of promoting the whole ecology, not just their particular models.
This isn't to say that a zillion of sheeple won't rush to line up for the iPhone 4; it just means it's a lot less likely. Face it, if Steve Jobs held up a hunk of his excrement that had been encased in a sealed polymer resin, branded with an Apple logo and did nothing but transfer $500 from your bank account to his, the queue would form immediately of loyalists unable to imagine their lives being complete without an iPoo of their own. But not everyone is 110% addicted to Cupertino Cool-Aid.
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