UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

After years of development, contract negotiations, and production, Apple’s iPhone went on sale yesterday. Thousands around the United States camped out or waited hours in line to be one of the first to buy one. And despite huge demand, Apple has managed to provide huge amounts of stock to retails stores and in many cases, meet demand.

But what should have been a triumphant moment in the history of Apple is quickly turning into a fiasco. In a case of classic uninnovation, the iPhone disables all features, including non-phone features, such as iPod playback and Wi-Fi web browsing until the phone is activated with a two-year service agreement. Users are only able to access an “Active iPhone” screen or make emergency calls. This is bad enough in principle, but now thousands of iPhone users are unable to activate their service plans because AT&T is having capacity issues and can’t handle the load of new activations.

Users calling AT&T technical support are being told it could take anywhere from 24 hours to five days to process activations. During this wait, their new iPhones are essentially expensive paper weights. To make matters worse, many users who are attempting to transfer existing service from another phone have found that their previous phones have been disconnected already. So not only have they just purchased a $600 device that won’t even let them access basic menus, but now they are also left without phone service of any kind.

Mac forums and cell phone forums have seen hundreds of posts from angry users who are unable to use their phones. Users who were previously supporters of Apple’s iPhone and waited hours to buy them have been posting bitter comments, such as these:

“Current customer here, not sure for how long though?? Over 13 hours waiting and no iphone!! Keep getting the same runaround from CS……”keep waiting” B.S.”

I am on my TENTH hour and still no phone!! CS told me that I could take FOUR - SIX hours. I am a current subscriber and my Pearl is dead now so I too have no phone!!

I am an existing ATT customer and have tried everything…activating, calling ATT, patiently waited the 2 hours they said that it would be fixed (that was at 6:30AM EST) … Very very non-apple like and frustrating to say the least. I am on hour 16 of being disconnected from the world and patiently waiting for activation.

While launching a new mobile product on such a large scale is impossible to do without some issues, the problems could have been largely avoided by not requiring phone activation to use the iPhone’s basic features. After customers waited hours or days and paid a premium price for a product that was billed as “three devices in one”, locking them out of the product completely in order to prevent a few lost mobile service sales is a disastrous decision. For thousands of users the device that Steve Jobs has repeated called “the best iPod we’ve ever made” is currently the best paper weight they’ve ever made.

With the prices of Plasma and LCD televisions falling so quickly, why are cables so amazingly expensive?

Big-box electronic stories train their sales staff to tell customers that new, expensive TVs will only work correctly with “high-quality” cables. These stores will often only sell very expensive name-brand cables such as “Monster Cable” and will not even offer the consumer a choice of less expensive cables. It is very common to have no place in a medium-size city that offer cables at reasonable prices.

Overpriced brand-name cables are a great way for the stores to increase their bottom line. Because of the intense competition in the television market, television sales usually result in small profits for retailers. However, cables are very high profit items. A cable that costs the retailer ten dollars may be sold for over a hundred. Retailers hope that when low-profit televisions are sold, they can make larger profits by pushing “required” cables on the consumer at hugely inflated prices.

A consumer buying a new television and DVD player will often also need an HDMI cable to connect the devices. Here are some recently observed prices of 4ft to 8ft HDMI cables in several big-box retailers. As a comparison, prices for similar cables at several online vendors are provided.

A fair price for an HDMI cable is $5 to $20 dollars, depending on the quality and brand. Similar cables pushed on consumers who buy tvs range from $79.99 to $219.99. There is absolutely no reason to pay these absurd prices.