1st
2015
The huge catch in the iPhone Upgrade Program that no one is talking about.
“Because the iPhone Upgrade Program isn’t tied to a single carrier, you don’t need a multiyear service contract. If you don’t have any carrier commitments, you’re free to select a new carrier or stick with the one you have.”
Those are the beautiful sounding words of the new iPhone Upgrade Program, which promises to free you from carrier restrictions forever. As we know, there are actually two models of the 6s (and two models of the 6s+) - one for AT&T, and one for “everyone else”. The common wisdom is that the AT&T phone has LTE band 30, but the phones are otherwise identical. i.e.: if you get an AT&T phone, it will work on the other carriers, just not with band 30 which they don’t have. If you get an “everything else” phone, it will still with work AT&T, just not with band 30.
Except - that’s not the case. As Apple has now revealed on their LTE specifications page, the two phones are not cross-compatible. The AT&T phone works on AT&T and only on AT&T. The "everything else” phone doesn’t work on AT&T at all. And by “works”, I’m talking about LTE service. It’s 2015 - you can’t say that a flagship iPhone (or any recent iPhone for that matter) is really functional without LTE service.
This seems hugely deceptive to me, and the tech press has completely overlooked it. The most prominent article I could find about the upgrade program states "Everyone else is getting model A1687/88. (I’ve confirmed this with the three other carriers.) This is identical to A1633/34 except for Band 30 (which I’ve confirmed with Apple.) Both models work ideally on Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Model A1687/88 will work fine on AT&T—it’ll get LTE and everything—but as time passes and Band 30 is more heavily built out, it will show somewhat slower LTE speeds than the A1633/34 model.”
Another article talking about carrier switching says nothing about LTE not working when crossing from AT&T to Verizon.
Yet, Apple’s page is clear. I called T-Mobile, and they told me that the AT&T model can’t be activated for LTE service on their network.
The upgrade program was supposed to make this easier, yet it seems to have made things arbitrarily more difficult, and no one seems to have any good information about what actually works and what doesn’t. Apple’s sales reps don’t know. The carrier salespeople don’t know. This is all extremely frustrating. The iPhone 6s is an amazing phone, but I feel like I’ve been sold on a lie. I switched away from AT&T to Verizon because they wouldn’t let me activate a new 6s on my unlimited data plan. The data service has been pretty terrible so far and I was planning on switching to T-Mobile to try it out, then back to AT&T if that didn’t work out. But now it appears that’s not possible. I wish someone would definitively answer these questions (and I wish Apple had done so beforehand).