I have to admit, I’m pretty excited about the iPhone 4S. I’ve had my iPhone 3S for a couple of years now, and although it’s been pretty cool, it was beginning to show its age. Some of the newer apps are a bit sluggish on my less-than-leading-edge hardware, and my phone doesn’t have the iPhone 4’s WiFi hotspot feature, which I’d find pretty useful. By the time my contract ran out this summer, the tech rumor mill was saying Apple would have a new phone out in October, so I decided to wait.
I’m not normally an early adopter of anything, so when Apple made their announcement on Wednesday, I thought about it for a few days before deciding I was going to buy the new phone. Finally, this weekend, I took the plunge and visited the Apple online store, and promptly stumbled on a defect that even the design wizards at Apple were unable to eliminate. In the otherwise elegant and powerful iPhone, I had discovered a glaring problem. A fly in the ointment. A monkey in the wrench.
The problem, simply put, is that you can’t use an iPhone as a mobile phone without having to involve a mobile phone company. Apple’s iPhone may be one of the design and technology sensations of the modern world, but they depend for their functionality on one of the most despised industries in the modern world. It’s like buying a Lamborghini Murcielago supercar and discovering that you’re only allowed to drive it on gravel roads.
(Mobile carriers aren’t as bad as they used to be. When I first started using one, I remember I wanted to change some feature and when I called the company, they told me that the change would require a $35 “programming fee.” Their network computers could follow me all over the country and stream audio to my phone in real time, but changing a field in the database was so difficult that I’d have to pay for it.)
The new iPhone works with any one of three carriers: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. I used to have Verizon before I switched to AT&T for my iPhone, and I’d love to go back — they were great to work with and I had good connectivity — but they use CDMA technology which (for reasons beyond my comprehension) doesn’t allow users to talk and surf the web at the same time. That could be a problem if I’m going to be tethered and online for hours at a time.
As for Sprint, well…let’s just say I have a history with those fuckers.
So that means I’m stuck with my current carrier, AT&T.
Picking out the iPhone at the Apple site was easy, and even linking the purchase to my AT&T account seemed to work just fine. The problem came when I tried to arrange shipping. You see, I have a rental box at a nearby UPS Store. Everything I buy online gets sent to that address so I don’t have to choose between staying home all day or having the package left in the hallway where anyone can steal it.
It turns out that this offends AT&T. Even though I had the UPS box listed as my default shipping address for the Apple store, the ordering system wouldn’t let me ship the phone to the UPS box, and a chat with Apple support confirmed that AT&T would only allow them to ship the phone to the billing address on my mobile account. It didn’t even matter that this was the exact same address to which they had successfully shipped the iPhone I was currently using.
I suppose there’s some security rationalization for this, but it’s not much security, since all I had to do was visit the AT&T site to change my billing address to the rental box and then go through the purchasing process again. I’ll change it back after I get the phone, so my bills arrive at home again. It was a useless and annoying waste of my time.
I realize this is not a huge problem, but I thought it deserved attention — perhaps some sort of prize for Special Achievement in Bad Customer Service. I mean, think about it: AT&T has figured out a way to screw with me that (a) is completely gratuitous, (b) hits me before I even have the product in my hands, (c) affects a product I’m actually buying from someone else, and (d) only really hurts their returning customers.
It’s a pity the folks at Apple have to work with losers like this.
Leave a Reply