This may become more clear as I continue this sporadic blog journey, but to speed things up, I love Apple. I love all that they touch and make and do and say. However, I have had some situations come up in the last 10 years that have made me rethink this. I’ll always be a fanboy but that still doesn’t mean I can curse their souls every once in a while. Recently, my fiancé and I finished a marathon session of Apple/AT&T soul cursing…
To back up a bit, I love my iPhone. Forever. Yes. And I wanted to get one for my sweetface as well for Valentine’s Day. We went into our local Apple Store and started talking to a representative who seemed quite preoccupied with the fact that my fiance’s phone was not eligable for an upgrade through AT&T until next January. Which brings me to tip #1 :
If your phone is not eligable for an upgrade via AT&T, and you are not a new customer, the iPhone 3G is $400.00 not the much advertised $200.00.
I have no idea why I didn’t realized this, but it was quite the shock. After we found out this information we stopped by a close AT&T store and the representative gave us some other interesting information :
If you’re on a family plan, you can upgrade any phone on the plan that is eligable and the phones can then be distributed to any number/person on the plan.
Meaning, my fiancé could not upgrade her phone but I could. Then AT&T customer service would be able to sort the phones out (or so we though). Regardless of the impending doom, this is exactly what we did. Got the iPhone for the $200.00 price (FTW!) and then ran home to call AT&T customer service so they could swap the phone information and get us up and running.
Once we started talking about the situation to the phone representative, we discovered that the Apple Store actually messed things up quite a bit due to tip #3 :
The AT&T & Apple Stores both have to activate an iPhone 3G when it is purchased. If you’re doing a phone swap similar to the above situation, make sure they tie the phones to the right person’s information!
This screwed us up because they activated the new phone with my information instead of my fiancé’s. So at that point, the new phone was then tied to my phone number /information and my old 2G iPhone was essentially de-evolutionized into a iPod Touch. It took us one more trip to the AT&T store to sort this mess out but we finally did. The lady at the AT&T store was awesome and completely cool about everything.
I guess the whole situation made me just think about Apple in a different light and AT&T for that matter…though I’ve never considered myself a fan of theirs anyway. Hope the above tips can help others out if they run into this type of situation in the future because, it was rather obnoxious. Later Gators.
