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Sad that Apple Intentionally Cripples its Products

by Colin Berkshire

There have been quite a few articles talking about how Apple has been crippling their Verizon/Sprint iPhone 7 phones to force them to go slower than the hardware allows.

The story you will hear is a bit different from the truth that I will share here.apple-logo

Apple could have purchased all Qualcomm chips and had phones that were as fast as Android phones. That is, up to twice as fast as the current iPhone 7.

But Apple made the decision to cut cost corners and to purchase the worse, slower, poor performing Intel modem chip. Apple saved a few bucks over what Qualcomm would charge. They made the decision to save these few bucks despite the fact that an iPhone 7 plus can cost over a thousand dollars.

A problem arose that Apple needed to buy the faster, better performing Qualcomm chip for Verizon and Sprint customers because those networks use CDMA, and only Qualcom makes CDMA chipsets.

But the allure of saving a couple of dollars per phone was too great for Apple to be bothered with customer satisfaction, better performance, and having a great service. They chose an interesting path:

  • For AT&T, T-Mobile, and other GSM networks, Apple uses the cheap-crap Intel modem chip. Cheap and slow are the two main virtues of the Intel Cheap-crap chipset.
  • BUT, to keep from making Apple’s choice for the cheap-crap Intel chipset look like what it was. Apple apparently has decided to cripple the swifter and better Qualcom chipsets that are in the Verizon/Sprint phones. Apple doesn’t want it to look like the truth: That they sold out their customers and are building an inferior product. By slowing down the Verizon/Sprint phones all of the models perform the same (that is: poorly.) And, Apple gets to make a few more bucks.

But it gets even worse:

Because of the Apple choice to choose the cheap-crap Intel chipsets, AT&T and T-Mobile customers cannot switch to Verizon’s network. They are locked into GSM only networks. So Apple’s customers pay dearly in two ways.

  1. When the Verizon and Sprint customers get an inferior product.
  2. When GSM customers are unable to switch to Verizon and Sprint.

But wait! There’s more:

There is one other terrible side-effect of Apple’s selling out their customer trust: iPhone 7 users on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks cannot use the Chinese high speed data known as SCTDMA (LTE-like) networks. Verizon customers can go to China and get good speed data. But AT&T customers don’t have the SCTDMA models that Verizon customers have, and this means that they can’t talk to China’s faster towers.

I find it very disheartening to know that Apple will choose to cripple their products so severely. But it seems to be a consistent pattern inside of Apple these days. Their new MacBook computers are a generation behind on the processors, you cannot upgrade the RAM on new Apple computers, and obsolescence is built in and intentional.

Apple has “evolved” a long way since the days of Steve Jobs. Steve didn’t have an MBA and didn’t think like Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer.