iPhone Carrier Exclusivity

Most likely because it violates some term or other in an exclusivity agreement between AT&T and Apple for the iPhone.

this seems more like apple kowtowing to the carriers rather than cutting them out. this would allow you to use your phone only on apple-approved carriers...

Apple went with Cingular not AT&T. The iPhone would not have been possible in this era of monopoly where we only have 3 carriers left. This is what we have lost not enforcing antitrust.https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Chooses-Cingu...

Saying back into the days of strong carrier control assumes that you ever left those days behind in the U.S. Since the great white hope for this happening was the iPhone, which is still only available on one single carrier, this seems somewhat naive.Either Apple couldn't get any concessions from the other carriers or they accepted a big bag of cash to give one carrier an advantage over the others. Either way carriers are in control. All you get is a slightly different set of consumer h

you mean, just like at&t forced you to buy since the iphone launch until 3 months ago?

I believe this is because Apple don't want iPhone to be used in unapproved network. Apple want to sign agreement with network operator to sell iPhone.

Apple has only one single carrier in the US, so how many carriers did they exactly change?. Did they start to sell unlocked GSM/CDMA phones to anyone who wanted?As the article states"ban cool apps for no real reason (Google Voice on the iPhone for one), cripple apps to protect business models (Skype on the iPhone) and outright ban data-heavy apps from third parties (Slingbox for the iPhone), all the while promoting their own app (MLB’s iPhone app)."Looks like compromise to me, all in i

It's not AT&T's fault though, it's Apple's for allowing an exclusivity deal. If you did a wholesale move of every US iPhone owner to Verizon or Sprint, their networks would be similarly suckified.Here in Australia the iPhone is unlocked and sold by every major carrier, and yet its launch still utterly trashed a couple of the networks. The situation has improved, but it shows what happens...

you mean, carrier subsidization worked for the iphone.

Not really. From the top article:> 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 Ap