81–90 of 128 posts
They are completely clueless how to provision a fucking phone. Never mind the idiocy of issuing a non-convertible mini-SIM when she got it around 2013.
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The fact you haven’t switched lines yet speaks volumes for where they have you. Right where they want you.
When cell phones came to Sweden in the 90's, all the carriers did the exact same thing, offering phones and plans as bundles. But after a couple of years of fierce competition, margins were so thin that it was 100% obvious that any plan that came "with" a phone was essentially just their regular phone plans + a payment plan for the phone. You saved absolutely no money by paying for your phone through a carrier, and f…
AT&T has had generous trade-in options to upgrade an existing iPhone to a new one since forever. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12 that was bought for list price, but AT&T offered somewhere around $350 for an old iPhone 7Plus that was half broken. There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market or through Apple’s trade-in program.
If you paid attention, these kind of trade-ins have been possible ever since the second iPhone appeared on the market.
It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract, but I can live with that: the plan matches my needs very well, so I don’t care, and I don’t upgrade phones every year either.
That doesn’t mean that I like AT&T’s customer experience: they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill. But that’s orthogonal to the earlier point.
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This is less and less true. TMobile has rolled out 600mhz 5g on the old Nextel push to talk frequencies it acquired in the Sprint merger. Rural coverage is vastly improved, like far far exceeding the other two. At least in areas where Nextel had a serious presence.
iDEN was 800MHz, the 600MHz stuff is UHF spectrum from when all the OTA television channels went digital.
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When cell phones came to Sweden in the 90's, all the carriers did the exact same thing, offering phones and plans as bundles. But after a couple of years of fierce competition, margins were so thin that it was 100% obvious that any plan that came "with" a phone was essentially just their regular phone plans + a payment plan for the phone. You saved absolutely no money by paying for your phone through a carrier, and f…
The plans let people who can't afford a $2,000 phone get one.
Do you guys know what AT&T revenues are? Compare with FAANG.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
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I have used t mobile for like a decade. They’re a better carrier, but I have had terrible experiences in their stores before too. You’re at the mercy of randoms working retail. The best experience is no experience. Just buy your phone directly from Apple and perform the SIM swap yourself. Apple’s stores are worse than the ATT situation in this article. For most of COVID you literally could not walk in and get added t…
My local apple store can now be walked directly into. I concede I didn't go there during the launch of the new phone. I did go there a few weeks before to buy an accessory, and it was free of fuss. I can confirm that during the still-COVID-but-almost-open phase, there were tents, appointments, and rude people.
Apple has gotten so much larger as a company than it was when the iPod was it's most successful product, but it's stores are basically still the same.
They should have started moving away from the in mall concepts a while ago or figured out a way to better handle the massively increased volume for things like service and order pickup. They do have bigger standalone stores now, but only in very dense city centers.
I remember having to wait for 20 minutes like 8 years ago just to pick up a phone case I bought online because only certain people could go get it. I wrote a thoughtful email and got a reply back from the store manager saying "yeah you're right, you've already paid you shouldn't have to do that"
They're only just now coming up with a way to handle in store pickups in a streamlined way: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/24/apple-store-bronx-dedic...
One time I walked in to buy an iPhone and also had to wait 10 minutes for an "iPhone specialist" - a regular Apple employee couldn't ring me up.
It sucks because you can tell they do spend a lot of effort on having good customer service and support, but it all comes together in such a bad way in their in person stores.
I can text Apple at any time and get excellent support that way. I just only buy things online/do support on text and phone.
Last Monday I bought 2 iphone 13 pros. One from Apple and the other from Verizon. (The Apple Store app on my phone wouldn't let me upgrade a number that wasn't attached to my iCloud account. So I stupidly bought it from verizon) We got the 13 pros in the mail on friday and neither me nor my wife liked the phone and we decided to return them. The return with Apple was easy and smooth. At the verizon store the manager…
Ironically, I just switched away from TMobile to AT&T due to the recent data breach.
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> it's worth taking the time to cool down from the initial frustration No it isn't. Every single company in America needs to operate like Chick-Fil-A. You will never have a bad Chick-Fil-A experience. Ever. I've eaten there for over 25 years. The slightest problem with anything is immediately resolved to your satisfaction. And why is that? Because there's competition, and because they want to be the best fast food re…
Chick-fill-a might be a bad example given their history with LGBT folks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_and_LGBT_people
CFA was in hot water because it’s religious founder was donating to charities deemed anti-lgbt. Not because they were assaulting, accosting, or discriminating against LGBT customers. I didn’t see any mention at all of acts of discrimination in the restaurants against anyone LGBT and nothing that would imply their customer service model pays special discriminatory attention towards anyone LGBT.
AT&T would be in danger of bankruptcy if it were not for the fact that they are surviving off government welfare through the Firstnet contract[1]. It was only buildout requirements mandated by that contract that they even have a modestly functioning network. Their business plan has been to acquire some crappy Mexican carriers[2], DirecTV, as well as the new DISH contract. There's minimal investment otherwise, poor sp…
The last good business move I think ATT made was getting exclusive access to iPhones in 2007 for five years or whatever it was. And that is why I’ve been paying them around ~$40 per line per month since. Actually, it was also due to them being the only big network with SIM cards I could pop out and use another country’s SIM. Verizon took forever to get SIM cards.
CDMA phones never needed SIM until LTE came along. I once had a Verizon "global" featurephone that supported both CDMA and 2G GSM. It had a Verizon SIM for the GSM side but wasn't otherwise needed for non-roaming connectivity over CDMA.
Att was destroyed as soon as they sold to cingular. I worked as a billing call center rep for Cingular when they bought them. The spent millions to rebrand everything with AT&T including signs at small ballpark fields etc. They had a bounty system where you could get paid if you found an old AT&T sign that hadn't been converted. About six months in they realized that Cingular's brand was despised by customers and tha…
When I say they tied our hands one example would be that they had system hard caps on how much you could refund a customer for incorrect billings. Specifically 75$ per day per account. So if a customer was legitimately owed 300$ then you would need to write it down and each day refund them 75$ until they were refunded their due. I actively kept up with that but if you got someone else who didn't care as much, well go…