How Apple, AT&T Fell Out

Apple and AT&T have raised the iPhone to the top of the smartphone market, but there’s been no love lost in the process. Wired magazine examines the fraught relationship between the iPhone maker and its exclusive carrier. When the iPhone launched, AT&T begged Apple to lift some of the load off its network by limiting YouTube videos in some way, but Apple outright refused. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable,’” an Apple source says. “They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.” Wired says Jobs is “apoplectic” about AT&T’s network and has discussed dropping AT&T altogether at least half a dozen times. AT&T complains, meanwhile, that the iPhone’s main radio was filled with bugs that led to dropped calls and that Apple has abandoned them to angry customers.