Saw that article yesterday. I'm sure the business case was well studied by Apple and goes to show how smart they are when it comes to maximizing their profits. The deals they sign with carriers literally cripple them and ATT has probably gotten more bad press about how terrible their network is because of the iPhone than they could have ever anticipated.

I remember when Nokia was trying to push hard to buy unlocked phones (N95) here in North America to free themselves from carrier controls, it was right around the launch of the iPhone. Even in face of all this evidence to the contrary, I maintain to this day if Apple had launched with an unlocked iPhone sold through their Apple Stores and online and sold services such as Visual Voicemail, MobileMe etc through their own servers as mandatory monthly/yearly add on services, they would have made a killing *and* revolutionized the North American mobile market.