[Lewisham]

I think the thing you are missing is not that Apple are happy or contented with low market share/high profit margins (which they are), but usually that they achieve that by succeeding in customer satisfaction.

In the US (not everywhere), they aren't hitting that note because they continue to be weighed down by AT&T. All those awesome features don't mean anything if you spend all your time bitching to your friends about dropped calls (which is all I hear from my non-techie friends here).

AT&T were shamed at the last WWDC over tethering and such, and they've been shamed again over new price plans which aren't necessarily consumer friendly, over continued awful service, over what Jobs himself said was "things have to get worse to get better... which means things will get really great soon." It used to be that Jobs would cancel a supplier to spite anyone who dared accidentally unveil a release before Apple did, and now it's a company that will let its brand get tarnished by having consumers kicked in the balls for five years straight.

Apple's exclusivity deal is anything but friendly to their customer base, and that is the key difference between the Apple of old and the Apple of new. People are upset not because the iPhone isn't great, but because Apple are acting like pricks, like they have done with Google and Google Voice, like they have with other App Store rejections (I find the "replicating iPhone features" particularly rich in comparison with all the spam apps on the App Store), like they have done about saying nothing to the consumer about why AT&T is sucking and why Apple appear to be doing nothing about it.

The Apple of old wouldn't have hamstrung their customers the same way Apple is now doing. Putting the user first was their mission. In the US, on the iPhone (less so the iPad), that is starkly not the case.

[gmlk]

You are correct, I think. I'm not in the USA, I'm in europe? AT&T wows isn't an issue over here, though there are problems here as well, take T-mobile in the Netherlands.

I do think however that if Apple thought that there was a viable superior alternative then they would have taken it, which they have done in a few countries, I believe? Any operator would have difficulty supporting the iPhone, that's the whole point: The iPhone changes the game.

Maybe more competition would have been better? But then again, it might not. Data infrastructure is weird: The network is most valuable if it's cheap and stupid, all the value is added at its edges. http://www.worldofends.com/ This however means, as Davis Isenberg and others already understood many years ago, that the best network is the worst to make profitable. I would not want to be AT&T.