A pretty funny post from the Faster Times makes a startlingly apt analogy: The iPhone is the Rachel to Verizon's Ross. If you've never seen Friends (has it really been 16 years since the show debuted?!), Rachel and Ross were the perfect-for-each-other but always-missing-each-other couple that created a lot of the show's romantic tension during its ten year run. The analogy, while silly, holds up.
The iPhone is the 2,000 pound gorilla of smart phones (and phones, in general): Hate it or love it, you have to admit that its fast, steady adoption rate shows people are attracted to it. Whether it's the App Store, the phone's slick user interface, or the coolness factor, people are seduced by Apple's penultimate gewgaw. So why shouldn't the most popular phone be on the most popular network? You'd think it's a marriage made in heaven.
Brown, author of the article, posits that AT&T has simply continued to outbid Verizon. As (Fake) Steve Jobs himself points out, AT&T is certainly not spending its increasing profits on growing its network. Rather, while the company has been (since 12/2007) enjoying evenly increasing revenues since becoming the sole carrier of the iPhone, capital expenditures have remained stagnant. Operating income has remained level, as well. All this extra revenue is going somewhere--either into executives' pockets or into paying Apple back for the providing it an exclusive relationship with its iPhone (and now its iPad, as well). This relationship built around monetary kickbacks and exclusivity seems to contradict Brown's prediction that the iPhone will eventually hook up with Verizon. If Apple continues to receive the lion's share of AT&T's profits, then the increased sales it would see on the Verizon network may be rendered moot. After all, Apple has shown that its modern incarnation is pretty darn savvy. The iPhone and Verizon could be less Rachel and Ross and more Juliet and Romeo--seemingly destined for each other, but star crossed lovers all the same.
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