Why I won’t be getting an iPhone on July 11th or anytime in the near future?
Well, it’s simple. Blame Rogers.
Being a webmaster, I would love to get an iPhone. The internet access that it provides gives me a lot of convenience with regards to checking the health status of my servers and other internet related stuff.
When the iPhone’s arrival in Canada was finally announced by Apple and Rogers, I was very excited, although, not exactly hopeful.
See, I’ve been dealing with Rogers for a long, long, long time. I knew their philosophy. Rogers philosophy has been very consistent and simple: Let’s see how much we can screw our customers.
With that knowledge, I had predicted (in a comment posting on another blog) that Rogers’ iPhone plans would give something like 200 MB of internet bandwidth for $60. I was a bit off and fairly surprised that they provided double that bandwidth for that $60.
However, when the official plans were revealed I got to read the fine print, my suspicions were confirmed. Rogers had created awesome f*%k-the-customer plans.
See, to get that 400 MB for $60 plan with reasonable features, you actually have to pay:
$60 for the plan
$15 for “iPhone value pack” (who would use their cell phone without call display?)
$6.95 ‘System access fee’ (a bogus fee that they used to make people believe it was a government thing.)
$0.50 for mandatory 911 access (why is this not buried in the price to begin with?)
And everything is taxed at 13% (in Ontario).
($60 + $15 + $6.95 + $0.50) * 1.13 = $93.17
$93.17 For basic iPhone service that includes a measly 400 MB of data access with a paltry 150 anytime-minutes. If this is not a f*%k the customer plan, I don’t know what is.
$40 (+taxes) more per month gets you 2 GB of data and 800 anytime-minutes.
The kicker is that these plans come only with a three years contract. So Rogers gets to screw you harder for much longer.
$93 per month won’t bankrupt me, but I have this thing called principle: I refuse to get screwed willingly by a monopoly.
I survived without an iPhone so far and I will continue to do so.
I have five friends and we were set to get an iPhone each, but with these ridiculous cost plans, our minds have been changed. Well, except maybe one of us who is more of an attention whore than the rest - he would pay that ridiculous price just to say ‘hey look at me, I have an iPhone’. So right here, Apple has lost 5 (maybe 6) potential iPhone sales.
Today, around the web, there are plenty of articles about how Apple is reprimanding/punishing Rogers for those atrocious plans by reducing the iPhone shipments to Canada.
I don’t think it is punishment nor retribution. Apple is a business and they must have realized that Rogers would never sell that many iPhones with those rates, so they redirected those phones to places that are more likely to sell them than Rogers.
The predictions that I made in my other article about the reasonableness of Rogers upcoming plans in my other article ‘Has Apple met its match in Rogers?’ have come true.
It’s now February 4th, 2008 and the iPhone has been out in the US for more than seven months already.
Here in Canada, there is no mention of it yet. Not even rumours that it could be coming any time soon. I believe it will be a very long time before Canadians could buy an iPhone legitimately and use it in Canada.
This is due to the nature of the Rogers company in Canada.
For those outside of Canada, Rogers is one of the telecom giants in this country. It is a cable and cellular provider and it is the only cellular provider in Canada using the GSM system. So that makes it the only company that can have the iPhone on its network.
And for those fortunate enough to never have had to deal with Rogers, Rogers is one of the worst companies here in this country. When they were my cable providers, they had the worst service, worst customer service and they jacked up their prices regularly. It’s hard to believe, but when I was with them, they jacked up the price of the good channels package by $1 every four months. The package was basically any channel other than the local ones and it started at $8.95. Four years later the price for the package had reached $21.
I had vowed to never deal with them and I changed from their cable service to Bell’s satellite service, which while isn’t the greatest, is still better than Rogers. However, Rogers went and bought my cellular provider Fido, the only other cellular provider here with GSM. So now, I’m back with Rogers involuntarily. Bell’s cellular service sucks, so it’s not even a choice.
So now with Rogers the only cellular provider able to carry the iPhone, the chances of the iPhone coming to Canada, on any reasonable terms, are almost slim to none. Rogers doesn’t have any incentive to give Apple any good deal and doesn’t have any incentive to give its own customers a reasonable deal on its data plans.
Why would it want to? Nobody else can have the iPhone currently and Apple can’t offer the iPhone advantage to anybody else in the country at this time. So Rogers can take their sweet time to get the deal that serves them best.
However, if Rogers stay stubborn, they may lose big time.
I heard whispers that Telus (the third cellular provider in the country) is in the early stages of switching from CDMA to GSM; mostly to get the iPhone.
Let’s hope that this rumour is true and that it happens fast enough to get the second generation iPhone. It would be sweet. It would allow me to get an iPhone (without having to buy one and crack it) and move away from Rogers at the same time.
Everybody knows that Apple’s iPhone is coming to Canada, eventually. Most people and publications speculate about when this momentous event will happen.
Today, few websites are excited about a blip that showed up on Apple’s site, and are extrapolating all kind of data from this blip.
Personally, I’m not exactly interested in when the iPhone will come to Canada. I know that it will. I would love to get one. But, it all depends on the ‘How Much?’ bit of the big picture.
Those outside of Canada probably have no clue on how ridiculous Canada’s wireless industry is.
For example, I’m with Fido (which was bought out by Rogers more than a year ago). I have their cheapest plan for my phone, which they advertise as “200 anytime minutes for $20 a month”. I have one additional service added - caller ID display - for an additional $3 per month. After fees and taxes and various ‘bend-over-to-stick-it-to-you-some-more’ additions to my bill, I pay $37.05 per month, not including any long distance calls that I may make.
So, the iPhone’s biggest question would be: how much will the data plans cost here in Canada?
Apple has been able to negotiate interesting deals with the carriers for iPhone buyers. I wonder if they can improve the situation here. I’m not too hopeful.
In Canada, the only GSM carrier is Fido and Rogers. But since Rogers bought Fido, effectively, there is only Rogers that can carry the iPhone.
Their only ‘reasonable’ data plan is $100 for up to 200 MB + $5 per additional MB. The cheaper ones are even more ridiculous than their parent company.
Compare the above to ATT’s data plan in the US at $20 for Unlimited data usage.
So while we know the iPhone is coming to Canada, the real question is: When the iPhone comes to Canada, will it be reasonable to buy and use?
After Apple’s announcement and subsequent release of the iPhone and later the iPod Touch, my brother and friends bitched about Apple’s stupidity and Steve Jobs’s control freakiness. They all complained about Apple’s unwillingness to allow or even encourage third party development of native iPhone applications.
Over the last few months, many, many articles have been written about the subject, mostly bemoaning Apple’s stance. Even Apple’s competitors in the cell business (namely Nokia) latched on to this and proclaimed that their phones are ‘Open to anything’, unlike the iPhone.
After few of such discussions with my brother and various other friends, I made a bet with all of them that as soon as Leopard is released, Apple will announce and then make available a native SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iPhone.
I made that bet on a logical rationale that my friends denied.
After the iPhone came out, it became widely known that it was running a version of Leopard. Since the Mac’s version of Leopard was still in Alpha stage at the time, it only made sense that the iPhone was running an Alpha version too.
Since Apple had set a June deadline to release the iPhone that meant they had to make sure that it works reliably. Which means that they chose a fairly stable build of the Leopard Alpha, fixed as many bugs as they could to insure stable and solid operation of the phone, made sure that their own applications on the phone are not stumbling on any bugs and they released that.
When working with an alpha-grade system, an SDK is nearly impossible. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t want to expose the inner working of an alpha-grade system to outside developers either.
Now that Leopard reached release status, that means all the features have been finalized and the code has reached an acceptable stability level. So now a native SDK has become feasible (Finally!).
However, Apple is still cautious. Just like prudent users who don’t install and use a .0 release on a mission critical system, Apple is taking its time to finalize and release the SDK. They’ve set the date of the release to sometime in February. That would give them time to iron out the majority of the big bugs that will crop out as soon as Leopard is released.
The iPhone’s SDK will be based on Leopard version 10.5.2 or 10.5.3. Of course the iPhone’s firmware will be updated to reflect the more mature version of Leopard available.
Now all we need is a firm date for the availability of the iPhone in Canada.
