So I broke down and decided to get an iPhone to do some development (hopefully) with it. People have told me there were month-to-month options for AT&T service, but this is NOT TRUE. You have to commit to a 2 year plan. The best deal we could find was to add the iPhone to an existing account. We had to bump the service (increase of $20) and add the iPhone data service (another $20). That’s a $40 increase to our bill for a few more minutes and the data plan. Okay. A $960 commitment, but I can live with that (I guess). Then of course I wanted the $299 4GB phone (that they still advertise prominently in the store) but it’s not available anymore – so I have buy the $399 8GB version. Okay, so now we’re talking $1,400 but fine.
So the guy at the AT&T store sets all this up and takes our money. Supposedly pre-approving all the AT&T service changes. All I have to do is go to iTunes and it will all be great.
Except I open iTunes and NONE of the options that we already supposedly setup at the AT&T store while we waited were there in the iTunes activation. Instead it’s $40 more per month than we were quoted (adding another $960 to the total commitment/cost, bringing me to $2,400 or so now). Oh, this iPhone thing is a great experience so far.
My wife kept a cool head and found online (not readily available in the official AT&T or Apple materials) an 800# we could call for “manual iPhone provisioning” – this was obviously an offshore call center – but after explaining the situation, the rep. supposedly made the adjustments to the account so that we will get the plan we ordered at the AT&T store. I guess we’ll find out when the first bill comes.
Not the kind of thing I expect from an Apple product.
What a terrible experience! One more reason to wait for the legally unlocked iPhones from France. 🙂
M.