The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated

I tried to parse my AT&T non-iPhone cell phone bill this morning.

I needed more coffee. I couldn’t do it.

Yes, the bill was confounded by switching the primary phone, but there’s a very definite pattern here.

Since we switched from Sprint to AT&T for the love of the iPhone we’ve seen our bills go up by about 25% for comparable coverage – and lower quality.

We’re not the only folks to notice this …

iPhone Plan Compared » a gthing science project

The breakdown:
Voice Plan - $40/mo for 450 voice minutes
Data Plan - $30/mo for unlimited 3G Data

So at minimum, you’re paying $70/mo. This probably won’t even satisfy most users who use more than 450 minutes a month. The next plan up is a $20 jump so you’re now paying $90/mo.

Yes, while every other piece of technology gets cheaper every day, somehow cell phone plans just keep getting more and more expensive.

Let’s compare this to Sprint’s offering:

The Sprint SERO plan (which anyone can get by going to a Sprint store and retrieving an employee’s phone number from their business card) is like this:

Voice Plan - $30/mo for 500 Minutes
Data Plan - included/ Unlimited
Text Messaging - included/Unlimited

So $30 on Sprint or $70 on AT&T (and keep in mind AT&T isn’t even throwing in unlimited free texting).

Ok, so this SERO plan scam involves a wee bit of fraud, but we noticed something similar with no ethical dodges.

But that’s not what I find intriguing here.

The interesting bit is using complexity as a weapon. It’s a legal dodge, brilliantly executed by cellular companies and perfected by AT&T. Plan comparison is pretty much impossible, and you won’t know the real price until the 3rd or 4th statement. The scheme worked for AT&T; despite lower costs and better, though not great, service, Sprint is bleeding customers and AT&T shares are rising.

Sprint is no angel of course. They’ve been sued for their deceptive contract swap practices. They haven’t been as clever as AT&T, however, at using the complexity weapon.

It’s not just Sprint that has fallen to the Empire.

Apple’s original iPhone plan was a blessed ray of light in the darkness. Crystal clear pricing, flat data services – water to a thirsty man.

No more. Now plans are through AT&T. The Empire has struck back. Apple has been, for now, defeated.

Ahh, but Apple is no angel either! They increase the cost of the iPhone, while advertising "price cuts". They use the complexity of cell phone pricing plans to deceive the naive and the overwhelmed.

Our society has to figure out how manage the complexity demon. It will take one heck of a consumer revolt to put it down.

Maybe an Obama victory will give us the energy to fight back …

Update 5/10/08: There is a precedent, though it's only partially encouraging. At one time home sales were encumbered with similarly incomprehensible contracts. This led to requirements to provide total cost estimates. So the contracts are still complex, but at least there are fewer shocks.

Update 6/11/08: In comments Sam points out that Sprint is "in" on the SERO gimmick, so it's not as shady as I made it sound. He also recommends 2600 The Hacker Quarterly as a weapon against the vile trickery of the Empire. I believe he's referring to Gaming AT&T Mobility. The journal is paper only (interesting topic worthy of comment) so I'll have to see if a local library has a copy.

Update 6/11/08b: Return of the Jedi? Don Reisinger speculates that this is stage of one AT&T/Apple divorce proceedings. Now that would be sweet ...

Update 6/12/08: Great comment here - complexity as a strategic tool in other settings.

Update 6/15/08: Ars tries to compare the iPhone cost to other 3G phones. Superficially it's comparable, but read the comments. Sprint (SERO, as above) and others offer many complex and "secret" options with deep discounts. So the iPhone list price is comparable to other 3G phones and services, but their prices may be deeply discounted.

Why Snow Leopard? It’s the cores.

John Markoff, who has special access to Jobs, says Snow Leopard is about new approaches to parallel programming and GPU use. The “breakthrough” is to be powered by newly acquired PA Semi’s Grand Central technology.

Somewhat coincidentally Coding Horror (Jeff Atwood) writes today (quoting Tim Bray):

… Tim has addressed both of those criticisms and rebooted with The Wide Finder 2 Project. It's bigger, badder, and brawnier, but the goal remains the same:

The problem is that lots of simple basic data-processing operations, in my case a simple Ruby script, run like crap on modern many-core processors. Since the whole world is heading in the slower/many-core direction, this is an unsatisfactory situation.

If you look at the results from last time, it’s obvious that there are solutions, but the ones we've seen so far impose an awful complexity cost on the programmer. The holy grail would be something that maximizes ratio of performance increase per core over programmer effort. My view: Anything that requires more than twice as much source code to take advantage of many-core is highly suspect.

Apple is attacking the enterprise market – with renewed confidence. A major improvement in the ability to leverage multi-core CPUs and GPU would justify that confidence.

I wonder how completely this has been factored into Apple’s share price.

About the solar heating meme

There's an increasingly popular GOP meme going round. The idea is that the earth is warming primarily because of increased solar radiation.

A few years back the same people said the earth isn't warming at all, and if Minnesota has another cool winter I'll be hearing that one again.

This is the intellectual equivalent of the bipartisan, but mostly left wing, conviction that vaccines cause autism. A plausible hypothesis, worthy of investigation, that persists when it fails our best available tests.

The solar forcing meme isn't as discredited yet as the vaccine/autism link, but my best science sources have it 1 foot underground.

These memes persist because they feed various emotional needs. In the case of solar radiative warming some of the more naive proponents also imagine their belief will decrease the urgency of CO2 reduction, but that's clearly illogical. If the sun were really adding to man-made warming our need to reduce CO2 emissions would be even more desperate.

So where does GOP talk radio get its ideas? From Bruce West, for one ...

Army Climate Skeptic: Global Warming is Man-Made | Danger Room from Wired.com

...Global warming is real, and at least partially man-made, according to controversial Army scientist Dr. Bruce West. Greenhouse gases have contributed to rising temperatures by as much as 70 percent, he said during a conference call with bloggers, arranged by the military.

For several years, West, the chief scientist of the Army Research Office's mathematical and information science directorate and an adjunct professor at Duke University, has been touting the Sun's effects on climate change -- and warning that the 'anthropogenic contribution to global warming' has been 'significantly over-estimated' by the the majority of the scientific community....

I'm an adjunct professor too. That's the academic equivalent of the mail-order doctor. It's silly to see someone using it as a credential.

Hobbyist sociologists will note several things here:

1. The military arranged a conference call with bloggers.
2. West is an IT manager, but he's talking about climate. He might as well talk about vaccines.
3. Right wing talk radio loves this stuff.
4. IT people have a lot of conviction about their amateur science efforts. Note I'm an IT person, basically. I have the same disease.
   
5. Despite all that, he's saying warming is 70% due to man-made CO2 emissions ...
   

As science it's pretty weak, but as culture it's interesting.

Incidentally, the sharp rise in gas price is a serious threat. It's making coal and other high CO2 fuels incredibly attractive.

(BTW, even though the GOP war on science is particularly aggressive, the left has its issues too.)

Quantum Computing: the lecture notes

From the professor (Scott Aaronson of Shtetl Optimized) who gave us his lectures on theoretical computer science, we now have PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus. Or at least, as of today, lectures 1-13.

We eagerly await 14-21, including "Free Will" (I really want that one) and "Cosmology and Complexity".

iPhone prices go up by $360 over two years

Great coverage from the NYT tech blog. The price of the iPhone didn’t decrease by $200. It went up by at least $120 a year …

The Cost of the iPhone: More Per Month for Data - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

The biggest news from Apple is what Steve Jobs didn’t say: It has completely changed the basis of its deals with AT&T and other wireless carriers.

According to a press release from AT&T, the carrier will no longer give a portion of monthly usage fees to Apple. Instead carriers will pay Apple a subsidy for each phone sold, in order to bring the price from $399 down to $199 for the 8 Gigabyte model. The company did not specify the amount of the subsidy. Subsidies of $200 to $300 are common in the industry.

What is more, consumers will now pay $30 a month for unlimited data service from AT&T, compared to $20 under the plan introduced last year. So even though the phone will now cost $200, consumers will be out more cash at the end of a two-year contract compared to the previous deal.

Of course, that includes faster 3G data service, so the price increase may be worth it. But we should call it an iPhone price increase, not a cut.

Unlimited data service for business users will cost $45 a month…

… For Apple, this move to getting all its money up front has several advantages. By using the same economic model as every other cell phone maker, it makes it easier to bring the phone to carriers in every corner of the world.

It also should help insulate Apple from the cost of people who buy iPhones and unlock them to use on carriers that don’t pay Apple the monthly fee. Now Apple will get its money, say $500, up front and it no longer has to police what people do with them. Whether Apple will still keep penalizing users who unlock their phones is one of the many questions that remain to be answered.

I preferred the clarity of paying for hardware and data services separately.

On the plus side this makes it easier to replace your iPhone with every contract termination.

On the minus side when you have to replace a lost or broken iPhone you’ll be paying out at least $500 (as is true for all other cell phones in this class).

I wonder if the new pricing model will make it easier to sell the iPhone into corporate accounts ...

Update 6/12/08: It gets worse (emphases mine)

Tidbits: $160 more expensive ...

...SMS messages are no longer included in the data plan either, so you'll have to pay extra for them. Previously, the data plan included 200 SMS messages per month. AT&T's Messaging 200 plan, which includes 200 SMS messages, costs $5 per month, so it would seem likely that the iPhone 3G's SMS plan would be similar...

... What does bother me about all this is how both Apple and AT&T are making a big deal about the iPhone 3G being cheaper, Apple with the "Half the price" tag line and AT&T with its "$199 Starting Price Significantly Expands Mass Market Appeal" line in the press release, along with the bare-faced statement that lowering the initial price will "accelerate subscriber volumes." That initial purchase will indeed be cheaper, but anyone who doesn't take the higher monthly fees into account is either being deceived or is just plain stupid. I know it's standard marketing practice to take advantage of the math-challenged with tricks like this, but it still feels underhanded.

More on using complexity as a weapon.

Update 7/3/08: Current AT&T customers don't get the $200 discount on new phones. So for a current AT&T customer, the two year cost of a 16GB iPhone hasn't increased by $160, it's increased by $360.

The end of Apple’s surprises

Everything about the Apple keynote address was exposed ahead of time – except that there’s no memory boost and the release is even more delayed than expected …

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

…iPhone 3G will start $199 for an 8GB model. The 16GB model will sell for $299, and is available in a black or white backing. It will be available in all countries starting July 11…

As Andrew says, it’s tough to keep secrets these days.

So why the longer than expected release time and the disappointing capacity?

Component shortages?

So will we see a 32GB version in a few months, once the component shortages go away?

Ahh well, I’ll order the 16GB model as soon as the online ordering is available.

Gordon’s WWDC prediction

Everyone needs one …

Gordon's Tech: An offbeat Apple keynote prediction

…Apple has an interest in an always connected touchscreen slate device that will do video display and conferencing, does audio and has a data-revenue stream associated with it.

So Apple will do a touchscreen slate device with a subsidized price, AT&T 3G data services, a required subscription model including the dotMac successor, and books through the (to be rebranded) iTunes store in partnership with Google and Barnes and Noble….

GPS and a pony too.

Minnesota naturopaths can order MRIs

Michael Paymar is our state representative. I want to know how he voted on this bill. Note, this was a DFL bill!

A bitter fight over who can be called 'doctor'

It took 99 years, but Minnesota has finally given official recognition to the practice of naturopathic medicine, which relies on the body's powers to heal itself.

Under a new state law, naturopaths -- who use everything from herbal remedies to biofeedback -- will be allowed to register with the state and call themselves doctors without fear of running afoul of the medical establishment.

... "I didn't realize how much of an issue it was going to be," said Rep. Neva Walker, DFL-Minneapolis, who championed the bill for years before it finally passed and was signed into law in May. "[I] didn't realize somebody who had supported all forms of alternative healing for years was going to be an enemy."

It allows those who qualify to use the title "naturopathic doctor" and expand their "scope of practice" to include such things as ordering blood tests and MRIs, and admitting patients to hospitals....

...The Minnesota Medical Association (MMA), representing conventional doctors, objected to allowing naturopaths to prescribe drugs and perform minor surgery. When those items were dropped, the MMA withdrew its opposition.

So, if a naturopath orders an MRI, do payors have to pay for it?

I'll ask Mike Paymar that question.

In the meantime the DFL dominated Minnesota legislature has decided that they want to continue to limit medical decision making to "professionals". What's new is that they've decided that medical science is no longer the basis for measuring professional expertise. Social judgment alone is the new criteria.

It's the same sort of reasoning that brings creationism into science classes. People who believe solar variation explains most climate change fall into this category. We're used to this, it's a familiar fight. I don't think there is any alternative to science for making judgments about the natural world, but I accept most of society doesn't agree with me.

So I object to the decision on the basis of using social fashion as the basis for measuring expertise, but that's not my primary objection.

My real problem with this bill is that it doesn't go far enough.

If you abandon science as the basis for expertise, then you shouldn't stop with naturopaths. Certainly nurses should be included, but also teachers, chiropractors, shamans, plumbers, lawyers, accountants, radiology technicians, cab drivers, flight attendants, mothers, fathers and, heck, children too.

Nor should the boundary be artificially set at test ordering. An MRI is not a small procedure, nor necessarily benign.

Let us open up all of medicine and surgery. If Naturopaths are ordering MRIs, then carpenters should be doing hip replacements. If you've every seen a 110 lb orthopedic surgeon rear back to slam the silver hammer down, you'd appreciate the role a good carpenter can play.

Seriously.

If you abandon science as a measure for expertise, then there are no more boundaries. I expect the courts will, in time, agree with me.

Payors and insurance companies will love this. Plumbers are not only much cheaper than neurosurgeons, the follow-up care will also be much shorter and less costly.

Caveat emptor.

Update 6/14/08: Representative Michael Paymar responded promptly by mail. He's guilty - he vote for this sucker. To his credit he doesn't mince words. He's a believer, Mike Paymar is not a rationalist. The Minnesota Medical Association approved the bill, so he felt he had cover to proceed.

Shame on them too.

Sigh.

Paymar is a very good representative, he wins this district by huge margins, and it's not like I'm going to vote for anyone else. On the other hand, it will be much harder now to send him our yearly campaign donations.

Joy of the global web -- what's 101 mean?

A reader of a 2006 post of mine on "Wiki 101" asked what the "101" means.

It's a wonderful question. I answered ...

Blogger: Gordon's Tech - Post a Comment

In North American universities there's a convention that introductory courses are assigned a course number of '101'.

I've never thought about why that's so, and why all schools in the US and Canada follow this rule.

So 'Wiki 101' means 'introductory course in Wiki'...

I'm guessing the question came from an international reader.

Google is investing a lot in integrated machine language translation software. Over time we'll get more more of these questions, and I'll be asking the same sort of questions when I read blogs from other languages.

I love this stuff.

Modern management literature and the Hammer of Thor

I'm obliged to consume a regular diet of management books.

There are some good ones*, often outside the best seller lists, but a heck of a lot of them remind me of 18th century medicine. They're case studies, or stories, about complex and emergent behaviors we can't yet understand. The most successful ones, unsurprisingly, spend quite a bit of time bolstering the surprisingly frail egos of corporate leadership. Once a CEO decides a book is worth reading, their enthusiasm will sell tens of thousands of corporate copies - mostly unread.

That's the formula, by the way. If you have the stomach for it, and some writing skills and a lot of luck, you can be wealthy.

Emily pointed out this morning that the meme is older than 18th century medicine. It's as old as myth. Living without science in the natural world, you live with lightning and earthquakes, storms and drought, plague and locusts and the mixed miracle of life itself. Humans are compelled to create internally coherent stories, and so myth is born. Thunder is the Hammering of Thor.

That's what most best seller management books are. Stories of The Hammering of Jack Welch, God of Thunder.

At least they're quick reading.

* I'd forgotten about this old page of mine -- I last updated over eight years ago! There's some good stuff there ... I'll recycle bits of it for the internal corporate blogging I do.

Another week, another bridge closing

The collapse of the 35W bridge was no fluke.

That's the lesson of the fourth or fifth major bridge closure in the metro area: MnDOT barricades Hwy. 43 bridge in Winona.

Minnesota's GOP legislature and GOP governors have been neglecting public infrastructure for a long time.

We finally got the GOP out of the senate, but still have a GOP governor. He's not what he used to be though, deaths from the 35W bridge put Pawlenty on the defensive. His presidential ambitions are at stake.

Maybe we need a law to hold legislators personally responsible for criminal neglect. Shame that legislators would have to write the law.

Why did Hillary Clinton lose?

Gail Collins opinion:

Op-Ed Columnist - Gail Collins - What Hillary Clinton Won - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... I get asked all the time whether I think Hillary lost because sexism is worse than racism in this country. The answer is no. She lost because Obama ran a smarter, better-organized campaign. It’s possible that she would have won if the Democratic Party had more rational primary rules. But Obama didn’t make up the rules, and Clinton had no problem with them until she began to lose...

Yes, Democratic primaries are pretty weird, not least in Minnesota. There's another factor though, which nobody has mentioned.

Nobody. You're reading it here first. So only five people understand this!

Collins has forgotten John Edwards. Nobody has noticed that when Edwards dropped out Clinton became more competitive.

I suspect Obama's victory was a side-effect of the who else was in the race and the sequence in which they left. Had Edwards stayed in I think Obama would have won sooner. Edwards split Clinton's base.

Why was that base splittable? Well, I like John Edwards, but I suspect a major factor was "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton". At some level I think running the presidency forever between two families struck many people as Banana republic.

Gail Collins should have picked this one up, I think she got caught up in the feminist storyline. The current fad is to focus on millions of allegedly enraged feminist voters. My bet is that a week from now that meme will evaporate from lack of substance. These voters will realize that they don't want to emulate the Naderites who brought us GWB.

Boring explanation of course, so you'll never read it in the media.

A shift in diabetes control

It's bad news that we weren't able to improve outcomes with tight control, but I suspect many diabetics found that control very hard to attain ...

Tight Rein on Blood Sugar Has No Heart Benefits - NYTimes.com

...Dr. John Buse, president for medicine and science of the diabetes association, the blood sugar/cardiovascular disease hypothesis has failed for people with established Type 2 diabetes.

For these patients, “intensive management of A1C for cardiovascular risk probably isn’t worth it,” Dr. Buse said.

The focus now will turn back to preventing and/or curing diabetes mellitus.

Raising gas prices may help reduce obesity, and thus reduce disease incidence over time.

UK university lecture podcasts – tears to my eyes

This kind of stuff brings tears to my eyes.

No, really.

Aaronson’s MIT lectures on theoretical computer science, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess journals, Apple’s iTunes U, the BBC’s In Our Time – all beautiful contradictions to recent history.

Today that illustrious group is joined by several illustrious UK institutions …

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | UK university lectures on iTunes

University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes.

Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging "iTunes U" section of the music downloading service.

But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.

The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics…

… The initial offerings from UCL will include material about neuroscience, the university's "lunch time lectures" and an audio news round-up.

The Open University is promising to make available 300 audio and video files with material from current courses.

Trinity College Dublin is promising lectures from journalist Seymour Hersh, scientist Robert Winston, author Anita Desai and politician Alex Salmond.

This will be available from iTunes U, launched by Apple computers last summer as a free education area within the iTunes online music and video store.

It is intended to make lectures available to students at the institutions and to a wider public audience.

This has been used by leading US universities to provide lectures and research news, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT.

Many universities in the UK have been making their own podcasts of lectures, but this will be the first time they have been distributed on the iconic iTunes service.

Open University vice-chancellor Brenda Gourley said it was an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to its courses.

"Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities."…

One hundred years ago we thought radio would bring expertise to anyone able to listen, and, thanks in large part to the BBC, it had some success. Fifty years ago people thought television would contribute, but the twin barriers of time, reach, and limited bandwidth were too high for real progress. Twenty-five years ago Bill Gates father (William Henry Gates - "CD-ROM: The New Papyrus") and I thought the CD-ROM would do this, and it might have but for the net.

Now it’s happening, and almost nobody notices.

Sniffle.

[1] See also: The quiet demise of the CD

Amazon is down?!

Other sites are online, but Google is slow and Amazon is …

http://www.amazon.com/

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

It’s probably a local router issue, but weird.

Update 6/6/08: Yes, it was down. Not a DOS attack though, probably human error.