Macopinion

Why I Won’t Buy an iPhone

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

Don't get me wrong -- I love the iPhone. I think it's a revolutionary device and I'm totally excited and can't wait to get my hands on one. That said, I doubt I'll buy one. At least not initially.

Why?

The simple answer is that I'm not in the target market. I don't need a cellphone. I work from home and I rarely need to travel. Sure, I run the occasional errand, go on a shopping trip to the City, visit friends or relatives, or take a vacation or business trip. But most of the time I'm at home and cellphone isn't critical. I really don't even get enough use out of my home phone (the majority of my communication is email or instant messaging).

Now I do have a cellphone. I got it mostly for emergencies, but it's convenient when I'm driving and it's a must-have item the few times a year when I travel. In fact, I hardly ever carry it around with me -- I usually just leave it in my car. Few people even know the number as I primarily use it for making calls, not receiving them.

My cellphone isn't fancy -- it's a prepaid Tracfone model. It cost me $19 a couple years ago. I spend around $180 a year on service ($100 for basic one-year service and $80 for extra minutes).

For my modest needs, it's perfect. There's no monthly bill and I can buy as much or as little service as I need. Some years I travel more and I'll buy extra minutes before I go, knowing I'll be using the phone more.

In comparison, the cheapest non-prepaid plans are around $480 a year which is a lot more money for minimal extra benefit.

Now if I disconnected my home phone and used a cellphone for everything, the costs might be more even. Except that I use Vonage VOIP service for my home phone: that's $300 a year. The total sounds quite similar to a typical cellphone's $40/month plan, except that with Vonage I get unlimited long distance, and I do make use of that. My calculations show for my total phone usage I'd have to subscribe to a higher-priced cellphone plan: at least $50 or more per month. So even combining the two I don't save money, and if costs are similar I rather prefer having two options so one can backup the other. For instance, recently when a storm knocked out power for twenty-four hours, it was nice to have my cell phone for communications.

Now we don't as yet know what the iPhone's service plan will cost -- Cingular has yet to announce anything. It could there's just one or two plans or perhaps several options to choose from. The real question is whether or not a data plan would be required. With data plans running $30 or more on top of a voice plan, the iPhone could get pretty expensive. I can see how some people would primarily use the iPhone's WiFi option and not want to have to pay an extra $30-$50/month just for the occasional non-WiFi Internet access.

What I'd hope to see would be a standard cell phone plan (around the $40 mark) with some free data minutes included. This would mean you could "taste" the data plan and use it in a pinch, but not be burdened with the worry that you might rack up huge overuse costs.

So the cell phone aspect of the iPhone at present doesn't interest me. If my needs change, I'd certainly get it over any other cell phone, or if it was cheaper, I might get one just to explore the technology. Perhaps as the costs go down, it might be worth it to me, though I'm not holding my breath: cell phone plans haven't gotten much cheaper despite the number of people using them, so I figure they're about as low as they're going to get.

What I really want is an iPhone without the phone. Just give me the "Internet Communicator" device and widescreen iPod -- that's all I need. Whatever that is called would make the ultimate PDA and being able to surf the web and check email via WiFi while at hotspots would be awesome.

Of course while I expect widescreen iPods next fall (just in time for Christmas sales), I doubt we'd get the WiFi iPod until 2008 -- perhaps a year after the iPhone debuts. Steve likes to hold technology in reserve and dole it out gradually, giving each device/upgrade a hot feature to sell it. A widescreen iPod with the multi-touch interface would be enough of a sell on it's own; despite the Zune having WiFi already, it's so useless in that device I can't imagine that putting pressure on Apple to include WiFi until the timing's right.

So for now, I await the iPhone with curious anticipation... knowing that though I'll want one, it'd be silly of me to buy one (and sign a two-year Cingular contract). Instead I'll wait for a year or so for the WiFi iPod. Sigh.

macopinion@designwrite.com