Jobs actually wasn't that good at negotiating - every carrier had rejected their strategy of "we just sell iPhones" rather than "we sell the Verizon $RANDOM_WOR

Jobs actually wasn't that good at negotiating - every carrier had rejected their strategy of "we just sell iPhones" rather than "we sell the Verizon $RANDOM_WORD powered by V-Cast". The carriers wanted to sell features piecemeal and control the user experience so they could extract more money out of you. The only company that bit was Cingular, aka "the new AT&T", because they bought AT&T Wireless and took that brand for themselves. Before that Apple was actually considering an Apple MVNO[0], which was a fairly popular business arrangement in 2006 for some reason. The cost of getting their control was a five year exclusivity deal with AT&T, which would turn out to be a huge pain in the ass for iPhone users as AT&T's network was not at all designed to handle everyone being able to use data at the push of a button. In fact, it makes me wonder if the carriers were deliberately designing their other phones to make it more of a pain in the ass to use data... [0] Mobile Virtual Network Operator. Basically any company that sells mobile service by renting out another company's network.