iPhone: "Stop Me Before I Kill Again"

Everyone seemed to have so much fun with my earlier post, “The iPhone as a murder suspect,“ that I thought I’d give more scrutiny to this topic. The death of the phone booth pales in significance compared to the possible death of the PC industry.

Based on its success with the iPhone, AT&T now wants to sell “netbook” computers on a subsidized basis, bundled with a service plan, similar to the way it sells iPhones and dumb phones.

And, as is obvious, these netbooks could easily be extended to notebook and even desktop computers.

Were AT&T and other carriers to succeed in this approach, it would kill the personal computer industry as it exists today. Say goodbye Dell, Lenovo, HP, and others.

One Blogger, Faultline, questions whether or not Apple itself will bother with a netbook. “(Steve Jobs has said the iPhone does everything a netbook does anyway, and was reported as saying ‘We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk’), the issue really is whether or not you belong to the school of thought which says every network needs to have specialist operator supplied equipment or whether instead, you are a believer in open networks.” You can find Faultline’s entire post here.

Meanwhile, AT&T is rushing to rollout a major upgrade to its 3G mobile data service in anticipation of a tenfold increase in network traffic from new iPhone hardware expected to go on sale in June, as reported here by appleinsider.

Last month, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said in an interview that "we have the infrastructure capability to go to 7.2 [Mbit/s], and we'll have the capability to go 14.4 and 20 in the next couple of years, so I think there's coverage we're going to improve, there's quality we're going to improve, and there's speed that's also going to get improved."

The current iPhone 3G only supports a maximum of 3.6 Mbit/s, so these plans would require you to purchase a new iPhone.