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Apple Store No Longer Sells iPhone With 2-Year Contract on AT&T
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Excellent response!I also took latin in my second school"Non-sequitur" OMG
Att, please vendere!
Sorry for the offtop.
My opinion on the situation: Att overspent over the last couple years. They gave t-mo 4B dollars for nothing, they bought 18.2B spectrum, Mexican provider, .... They need to make money somehow. This is how life it is. VZW, T-mo are in the same, deep bent position.
T-mo CEO Mr. Legere started all this freedom-uncarrier game.
He "brainwashed" us with his modern-liberal idea: if we switch from Att "bad" network to t-mo "fastest" 1/2size-att network we all can save. Also there was created strong public opinion(myth) that t-mo has the best CS on the planet. ( I got not connected test drive kit, had to return it, twitted t-mo ceo, nobody helped me, cannot order another one since I "tried" the network already ). For 10 years with Cingular-Att I had no problem with CS. They are even better now.
I just calculated how much money I spent on att + phone per month and with my discount I realized, that I loose around 40 dollars I switch to t-mo. t-mo has only one good feature for me, unlimited data/text roaming.
Same idea with all share Att plans, listen to them I have to switch from unlimited to more expensive limited plan.
I also like, how people say here "FREEDOM"
I also expect that sooner or later ( I hope later, but it will be sooner) Att stops subsidy. By that time t-mo expends its LTE band 12 low frequency network. Iphone 6s supports lte 12. T-mo plan become less expensive compare to what I have now. I switch.
My opinion that business build long term relation with me, not I with business. I hVe to pay more one way or another and I can find a better deal I take it.
I'm very aggresive player on my Edgeworth diagram.
My prof. told me once "you can Earn less, but save more!" I told him "you can earn more and spend less to earn even more."
Let's all just switch to Cricket and pay full price for cellphones. You're still saving cash in the end.
Maybe, but most people don't live within easy driving distance of an Apple Store to buy a new phone.
If I have to give up my plan, I think I'll consider T-Mobile. They have the better plans for my use than AT&T (if I had to pick from current plans). My plan (unlimited) is best for me now (most GBs of data even if you want to complain it's not truly unlimited for the cheapest price. No one else is going to offer me 5 GBs for 30 dollars a month. And I have a cheap talk plan as that is grandfathered too). But if I have to go off of it, AT&T doesn't offer anything I'm ok with. T-Mobile has a really cheap 2 GB plan that will just stop data if I go over. Or a little more expensive that is kinda like mine but I only get 2 GBs before I get throttled (and T-mobile doesn't call it unlimited). All I care is I don't pay extra if I go over and it's in my price range. AT&T doesn't offer me anything that does that of their current plans.
Why do you think that? I kept my unlimited plan when I got my 6+ with next. My daughter kept her unlimited plan when she got her 6 with next.
Because at the time the AT&T rep told me if I switched to next if loose it. Guess things have changed.
By the way,others have told me the same claim as you yesterday. But thanks for the heads up
Duh. Because you said you would pay the full price of the phone. Just that you would pay it in monthly installments. So if you cancel service, you still owe that amount. You can't discharge it. Why do you think that 2-year contract comes with an early termination fee? I mean, using your own logic here -- even with the carrier subsidy you don't own the phone because if you stop paying and cancel service they are going to want you to pay your final bill + ETF.
When you "trade in" a phone on the next plan the remainder of your balance on the phone is discharged. With AT&T Next12, that means that your last 8 payments are discharged. That's $260. In addition to that you save $15 per month on the "Device Access Charge" since you don't have to repay the carrier subsidy. Combined together that's $440. (Unless you pay for 10 gig of data per month, then you save $25 per month.)
I suppose for you maybe it is more clean to just get the $450 "savings" up front. Then attempt to resell the phone for $450 on your own time. If it were me, I don't want that hassle of selling. So i'd just trade it in for the new iPhone. That said, I wouldn't touch AT&T with a 10 foot poll. Unless they were the only choice.
I guess the key difference is at the end of the 2 year period on a subsidized plan I don't owe anything however with next if I plan to keep my phone unlike with the subsidized plan I do owe money still on the phone and have to pay that off.
I think I've looked at this every way I can and no matter what NEXT costs more plain and simple. It's unfortunate I really don't want to have to go out and take the time to research carriers and find a new plan.
That's more of a factor of how it is being paid off. With a subsidized plan you pay $200 down right away and then pay off the remaining $450 over 2 years through the subsidy payment that is part of the line/plan charge. While with Next you don't pay anything down and pay over 2 years so that at the end of it you have something like $200 left which you can continue paying off monthly or pay what remains right away and be done at that 2 year moment, or trade the phone in in place of the remaining payments. (I just used example numbers there for simplicity of the example.). Still, as mentioned before, depending on your plan and needs one option (subsidized vs Next) can work out better than the other.
Yeah that's the problem, the logic behind these NEXT plans sounds good but they start off at about the same cost as what the subsidized plans were before the next thing came a long. So your plan rate doesn't go down it's about the same maybe just a little more and then you have to pay for the phone on top of that.
On the 2 year plan, if you don't upgrade your device, you lose money - the money built into your contracted plan to allow your carrier to recoup the cost of the subsidy - a subsidy that you are paying for, but not using.
In the case of Next, you can select the number of payments. AT&T currently offers 4 options: 30 month payments, 24 month payments and 20 month payments, plus another option to make payments (varies depending on device) plus a downpayment. If you select the 24 month payment option, at the end of 2 years, you own the phone and your monthly bill drops by the amount of the the equipment payment. For the Next plan, you can also turn your device in early and get a new one. In that case, you are effectively selling your (24-, 18- or 12-month old) device for the equivalent of the remaining number of payments x payment amount.
In my case, we pay the phone off and hand it down to one of the kids. But only you can decide what is best for your situation. My only advice would be to take a look and see if you can save money on your cellular bill by switching. If not, stay where you are.
It depends, for some it goes down enough to make Next a somewhat cheaper option. For others not so much.
If you are on the old, like 3-4 year old, AT&T individual tiered data plans (or even an older unlimited account) that price increase isn't a function of NEXT it's a function of the Mobile Shared Data plans that AT&T introduced.
If that's the case, then, yea find a new carrier. Or, buy your next iPhone, not from Apple or their website , but from AT&T itself. Supposedly you can maintain your existing contract without moving to a Mobile Share Data plan (and it's price increase). However, you might have to forgo the subsidy. As this is apparently what grandfathered Unlimited data contract holders do to maintain their Unlimited contracts.
In that case it appears that AT&T is just following in Verizons footsteps. Verizon stopped offering subsidies for unlimited data users like three years ago.
I'm on the plan I had when the very first iPhone came out, so yeah I'm definitely going to have to look into my options. I understand the contract phones are still available through AT&T, my concern is that the next iPhone is still months away and I kind of wonder if this change on Apple's part isn't just a reflection on what AT&T's plans are they may just not have initiated it themselves yet. Or perhaps they just want to have the opportunity to have one of their salespeople explain the "benefits" of the next program to try to have more people move to their more expensive plans.
I'm not really concerned with losing unlimited data as for both mine and my wife's phones we usually top out only occasionally around 9GB's so a 10 GB plan would work, if of course it wasn't more expensive.
The phones should be sold at retail prices with no subsidy. To offset this, the price of the monthly service should be cheaper! Check out MVNO services like Cricket (which uses AT&T towers). You can get a plan starting at $35.. but you'll need your own GSM unlocked phone. I switched from Verizon to Cricket (brought over my iPhone 6 Verizon Unlocked). I had been grandfathered into a Verizon unlimited data plan but Cricket is still much cheaper and the service was great. I will pay retail for my iPhones but offset the cost by selling my old iPhone to BuyBackWorld. I still come out ahead since my monthly service is less than half the price I used to pay.
That's basically what they are doing and what the current plans provide (if you go with Next/Edge, purchase outright, or just have your own equipment).
Well yes but with the addition of raising the rates of their plans before applying their "discount".
I would say, yea. It's a reflection of market place reality. 2-year contracts used to be a fairly easy sell because the customer felt they were getting a pretty good deal, $400 off. But the charade is fairly well understood now. So like a magic trick that has been exposed, it get retired. But, that's just the pubic face what is offered to new customers. I'd find it exceedingly unlikely (perhaps even illegal) that they'd disown customers operable existing contracts. If you like your service and your contract, I'd keep it, until something unequivocally better comes up.
This too. However, my understanding is that the higher price of Mobile Shared Data plans isn't per sé a defacto price increase. But rather a reflection of putting unlimited phone minutes and unlimited texting in the contract. NEXT is only a way getting the phone paid for. Not a cost. NEXT isn't even needed if you are just going to pay for the phone outright.
If on you are only paying for say 450 mins of talk and $0 or $5 for 200 text message on your existing AT&T contract, then, yea -- with a Mobile Shared Data plan / contract you'd be paying for something you don't need in the Mobile Shared Data plans, not to mention pitching the unlimited data.
Is that 9 to 10GB combined? Or, individually 9 to 10GB data each? Data is shared now and you pay a "Data Access Fee" to access it. So make sure to have enough data for you and your wife. Since you'd be moving to a tiered data plan, from an unlimited, be aware that if you exceed the shared data pool they'll charge you $15 / GB at 10 GB shared level. (Even more per GB, at the lower levels)
My advice -- stay with your existing contract, keep your existing phone(s), and figure out if you can find a better deal. For my family -- it was no question T-Mobile. But it may not be for you.
Contracts used to be metered in talk minutes and number of text messages. They just rolled the cost of unlimited both (or most of the cost) into the Mobile Shared Data plans.
I think it also reflects that voice and text are basically free while we use more data now for everything.