As you probably know, using the iPhone means choosing aT&T
Wireless as your cellphone carrier. if you’re a verizon, Sprint, or
T-Mobile fan, too bad. aT&T (formerly Cingular) has the iPhone
exclusively at least until 2012.
Why did apple choose aT&T? For two reasons.
First, because apple wanted a gSM carrier (page 8). Second, because of
the way the cellphone world traditionally designs phones. it’s the carrier,
not the cellphone maker, that wears the pants, makes all the decisions,
and wields veto power over any feature. That’s why so much traditional
cellphone software is so alike—and so terrible.
on this particular phone, however, apple intended to make its own decisions,
and so it required carte-blanche freedom to maneuver. aT&T agreed
to let apple do whatever it liked—without even knowing what the machine
was going to be! aT&T was even willing to rework its voicemail system to
accommodate apple’s visual voicemail idea (page 53).
in fact, to keep the iPhone under apple’s cloak of invisibility, aT&T engineering
teams each received only a piece of it so that nobody knew what
it all added up to. apple even supplied aT&T with a bogus user interface
to fake them out!
