For all who don't know, the iPhone 4 went on presale today, and in a brilliant show of poor planning AT&T servers promptly crashed. As of right now about 1 preorder is going through every 20 minutes! I can't help but ask, why??
Lets look at the details here:
This is the 4th generation iPhone, a device that has already sold over 50 million units!
AT&T has experienced server problems relating to iPhone debuts in the past, so this will mark the 3rd time they have failed.
The cellular giant definitely has the server capabilities to handle an onslaught of this magnitude so why are they fucking this up for all of the loyal customers who want to give them more money. Well I think money is excatly the reason.
A friend of mine pointed out very wisely that for AT&T its an issue of return on investment, it would have taken a decent amount of man power to set up a good database. I'm sure someone crunched some numbers and realized that even if their servers went down people would still buy the phones (I am in that camp currently).
I accept this as the reason but I am still pissed, I mean seriously, do they really not give a shit about their customers.
Oh and there is one more thing...
In case you didn't know AT&T has a new data plan structure. There is no more unlimited data. Instead you can pay $15 for 250Mb of data or $25 for 2Gb of data per month. Now don't get too upset yet, because for most people, 2Gb is much more than you will ever need. The problem in my opinion is the future, let me explain
The iPhone 4 brings some great features, HD video, video chat and a better screen so you can read books and watch movies at higher resolution! YAY!
Well this is great, except that if you want to stream Netflix and maybe upload a few HD movies you can kiss 2Gb of data goodbye pretty damn quickly!
So welcome to the world of pay-as-you-go data. If you already have an AT&T unlimited plan, don't worry, you can keep it, and you should! Hold on to that baby as long as you can.
So here's the deal, if you are as frustrated with AT&T as I am, but feel that you can't leave because you love your iPhone then you are obviously not alone. The only thing we can do is continue to complain but unfortunately I don't think anyone will listen. Hopefully some day the major cellular companies will fall to an organisation that values customers and works to provide the best service that is technologically feasible, not what drives their margins up. Leave your thoughts so I don't feel like I'm losing my mind :)
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