Steve Jobs he was a CEO who liked to have control over every aspect of the business done by his company, and this was reflected in the relationships he had with the company's partners, one of the most important of them being AT&T. CEO Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), wanted to control the relationship between the operator and his company from the very beginning, and thanks to AT&T the iPhone became extremely popular in the US, but everything could have changed radically if Steve Jobs and would have fulfilled it the intentions he expressed in several lines.
By 2010 many consumers in the United States were buying Android phones just so they didn't have to have AT&T as a carrier. Jobs had been leaning on AT&T executives to speed up its network upgrades since the iPhone had launched in 2007. But he had limited leverage until the start of 2011, when the exclusivity period with AT&T expired and Verizon could also offer the iPhone. He'd considered dropping AT&T and switching to Verizon more than half a dozen times, but concluded the move was too risky.
In 2010, 3 years after the launch of the first model of the iPhone, there were many Americans who avoided AT&T, and implicitly the iPhone, because of the operational problems that the operator's network had. Although Jobs put pressure on the management of the operator to improve its network, the procedure was long-lasting, so Jobs repeatedly thought of giving up AT&T in favor of those from Verizon. Fortunately for AT&T, Apple could not do this so easily, the American company only managed to launch an iPhone compatible with Verizon's CDMA network in 2011, but this after years of losing many customers.
It would have required redesigning the iPhone, because Verizon phones used bigger cell radios than AT&T phones, and there was no additional room in the iPhone case. Verizon cell radios were well known to be battery hogs. Finally, it wasn't clear at the problem's peak in 2009 that Verizon would be able to handle the iPhone traffic any better. "There were plenty of conversations along the lines of 'Why are we sticking ourselves with this boat anchor,'" Bob Borchers said. "But every time we had that conversation, it always came down to the fact that the technology challenges were too high to warrant doing the work."
Although it would have wanted to "get rid" of AT&T since 2009, when the problem had reached its peak, Apple did not want to collaborate with Verizon because the frequencies used by the operator forced the baseband chips to consume more energy than in normal mode normal. Moreover, the implementation of chips compatible with these networks would have forced Apple to rethink the design of its iPhones, and technological problems delayed the launch of a CDMA iPhone for Verizon by 2 years.
