Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
I knew this would happen. As time went on and details emerged, my prediction of how miserable it’s going to be trying to buy an iPhone is going to come true.
You see, now that AT&T is wearing the pants, it’s doing it’s usual business of making things as complicated as possible ensuring that it’s making as much money as possible and making your job as a consumer as difficult as possible.
According to a few sites, including Engadet, there are a few different prices for the iPhone depending on your situation.
So how do I know if I’m eligible for an upgrade discount? Who knows. I can guarantee that the dude at the AT&T store is going to do everything in their power to make sure I pay the full non subsidized price. That’s been my experience for the past 6 years (starting with Cingular and now AT&T). I would sometimes even bring printouts from the AT&T website showing the price of a device with my corporate pricing etc and they would ignore it and refuse to sell to me.
So this begs the question. How are the Apple employees in the Apple store going to know how much to charge you for the phone? Are the tapping into the state of the art AT&T Siebel Customer Database? I don’t think so.
I think this pretty much ensures that I’m going to go to the Apple store to get my iPhone because I’m betting that the Apple employees are going to be more motivated to sell me an iPhone and get my but out of the store. But really, I’m not sure how this is going to work out.
In fact I am 100% certain I am not eligible for the upgrade price. How do I know this? Well I logged on to my AT&T online account and clicked “Upgrade Phone” and it told me:
Not sure where it’s getting the 04/15/2009 date. Apparently a number of factors picked a pretty arbitrary date. All I know is 04/15/2009 is > 7/11/2008 and that’s all I care about .