its a modern problem in today's corporate culture where the only defining way of being succesful is having an executive board that rakes in more personal income than the next company.
Even making millions at the executive level isnt' enough anymore. Corporations are looking for any cost cutting measures at the bottom in which to further maximize the gross profits into the shareholders hands.
This is unfortunately happening because of a few things over the last... 20 or so years.
in the 90's. We saw unprecendented growth in virtually every modern sector. Boomers were still the majority of the spending population and were still fully working. Fast Forward 20 years to the modern era. the boomers are dieing, Retiring and generally no longer being the prime focus of business needs.
However, Corporation got into the mindset that every year must be record profit and every year, executives need more.
With the shrinking purchasing power of retiring boomers, and a smaller population of Gen X and Gen Y. the Overall purchasing should have started to flatline. Record growth slow and come to a stop. Less people purchasing should mean less overall revenues (or at least a stop to the insane rampant growth everyone was experiencing in the 90s).
However, Corporate greed never abated. Those CEO's and Executives and boards of Directors still want to maintain increase to profits year after year.
So how do they do that? in many cases, Cost cutting.
But of course, they could never cut their multi million dollar salaries. So they cut every where else. Lower incomes for the employees. Less bonuses and benefits to the staff. Less discounts and incentives to the customer.
Long gone are the days of walking into a tech store for example and bargaining the price of something down. these days it's MSRP or minimal standardized discounts. its Billion dollar profitable companies scaling back offers. Apple is a perfect example of everything I've mentioned for example.
So while ATT could likely continue to offer discounts and subsidies on their devices, since the cost to cover those are included in your monthly bills, They probably hit some other wall, where profits weren't increasing fast enough. So, Cut out the subsidies, keep your monthly fees the same... More pure profit into the share holderes and board of directors pockets....
Unfortunately, this is a terrible way of operating business and does more harm to the economy overall than help. The Economy only works when money is being spread around, and being spent. Not hoarded by a few. the 99% aren't wrong. This reeks of corporate greed and too few people trying to hold onto too much money. as I've always said. the economy would fair better having 100 people by $20,000 cars, than 1 person buying a 2 Million dollar car.
I know, when I see corporations that treat their employees like garbage. and their customers even worse so that all the profits can be hoarded... I tend to avoid these companies like a plague and opt to give my money to places that treat everyone in the company as equals..
But this would be about more than just pricing. As a carrier, Apple would be able to use its hardware/software/services/carrier ecosystem to not only make the best quality handsets and software, but also would be able to build a solid backbone to carry all of the data that is sent to and from these devices.
