Friday, November 6, 2009
Is Verizon’s New Early-Termination Fee Anti-Consumer?
Beginning Nov. 15, Verizon subscribers looking to get out of their smart-phone contracts early will pay $350 for the privilege. That early-termination fee is double the current one, but Verizon insists it’s justified because of the higher prices of today’s phones. An interesting move for a carrier that just last year agreed to pay $21 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by California consumers over the very early-termination fees it is now increasing.
Though it made no mention of a next-generation handset at its iPhone OS 3.0 preview last week, Apple is clearly hard at work on one. And if history is any guide, the company will bring it to market sometime in mid-June just as it did the iPhone 3G last year. And if history is any guide, this new iPhone will be a great improvement over its predecessor. So “100 percent confirmed” reports leaking out of AT&T claiming Cupertino is doing exactly that aren’t all that interesting. 
The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And, as with every Apple product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds …
So that “future product transition” Apple’s headed for later this year? The one that will bring with it “state-of-the-art new products that [Apple's] competitors just aren’t going to be able to match”? It’s looking more and more like it may involve a new chipset–possibly even an internally developed one.
