We hate to say this, but in the interest of fairness we must: sometimes it really is the customer’s fault. A man took his three iPhones out of the country, and now he’s got a $4800 roaming bill because he didn’t turn them off and they kept checking for email. Well, he didn’t turn them off off. You know, there’s standby off and off off. Or maybe you didn’t know? It’s all in the Apple iPhone User Guide—we just looked at it online and it’s right there on page 14: how to put your phone in standby (which just turns off the screen) and how to shut it off completely.
Or you can check out pages 49 and 50, where it shows you how to disable an email account temporarily or permanently so that it doesn’t check for messages. Or look at page 94, where it explains the airplane mode: ‘When airplane mode is on… no cell phone, radio, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth signals are emitted from iPhone. You can’t make calls, send or receive text messages, stream YouTube videos, or get stock quotes, map locations, or weather reports.”
Our point isn’t to be smart-asses about someone’s dumb mistake, since we all make those every week. (The folks at Slashdot are going back and forth about whether or not he should be held responsible.) But it’s interesting to see Apple’s “it just works” sensibility brought to its logical conclusion. We suspect the greater their market share grows, the more we’ll see supposedly “anti-Apple” stories like this, brought on by cheerfully oblivious consumers.
“AT&T is cruising for a bruising” [The Inquirer via Slashdot via a reader tip]
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well i assumed they aren’t exactly going to negotiate with me anyhow. and i asked everyone a work with (at a high risk finance company) no one read their cell phone contract. we maybe asked a few billing questions, but then again, i wasn’t buying a fancy pants iphone. i bought my phone to make phone calls, and use as a usb modem. which at that time it was still a new technology and was covered in my unlimited net usage. eventually it caught on and they sent warnings to me tell me to stop or they were going to charge me a separate data plan usage(because they started selling pc modem cards and wanted me to buy there plan along with the card.)
Years ago (about 15 years or so, I think), AT&T had an ad campaign known as the “You will” campaign.
In essence, the narration asked a bunch of stupid-shit questions, usually in groups of three, something like, “Ever by concert tickets (pause for dramatic effect) from an ATM?” After three of these questions, the narration would go, “You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.”
Well, my friends and I made a spoof radio ad, based on the same theme. The last item in our list, however, was, “Ever see a $15,000 phone bill? You will! And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T”
I feel so prescient!
Here’s the deal. The guy and two other members of his family each had an iPhone. They took it with them to make voice calls but didn’t think the Internet would work overseas… Wait what?!! So their phones were not “OFF” because they used them to make calls and they knew that their iPhones calling functionality would work but the internet would not? You buy an expensive piece of equipment and sign a CONTRACT from a company that is in an industry known to screw its customers with international roaming charges, yet you fail to read the manual or the CONTRACT you signed. Apple owes them nothing and AT&T owes them a “Thank You” letter.
@goodguy812: “i bought my phone to make phone calls, and use as a usb modem. which at that time it was still a new technology and was covered in my unlimited net usage.”
You mean you thought it was covered in your unlimited net usage.
This is nothing new. Sprint has had provisions against tethering (using a phone as a modem) since they started offering data plans. Only recently have companies like T-Mobile been OK with it; Verizon had a way to skirt around it with an add-on package, and AT&T/Cingular has always been a stickler about it.
Even CSD (dialing up your ISP) wasn’t OK, despite the fact that customers thought it was “just like a phone call”. Well, it wasn’t; you’re bypassing the vocoder compression and using the circuit at 100% duty cycle. The cell companies didn’t like that.
Reps would tell people it was OK all the time, even though contracts specifically prohibited it. At least 3 times I saw people in my local Sprint store arguing with a rep about data charges, and this was back in the late 90s.
(This does not negate the fact that US cell companies seriously over-charge for data.)
Most cell companies have always sent warnings and imposed restrictions when using plans designed for on-phone usage as a dialup replacement. I know I got several with Sprint back in 1998; their terms explicitly forbid using the phone as a laptop modem, even though you could technically do it, and they wouldn’t raise much of a stink until a certain usage point… What that usage point was, however, was and still is unknown.
I don’t know if AT&T does anything similar, but when I went to China a few months ago T-Mobile sent me a text message as soon as I turned on my blackberry that essentially said “Hey! You’re using one of our partner networks elsewhere in the world! Enjoy your continued service, but be warned that it’s probably going to cost you a metric buttload of cash!”
@goodguy812: “well if you had kids, you’d feel differently.”
huh? I do have kids, two of them. I don’t get your point.
Anyways, please do yourself the favor of reading anything you’re signing. Especially when it’s tied in to a monthly charge. There’s no law saying you have to sign it in front of them. And it shouldn’t take that long either, if you know what to look for. If you don’t read it and you unknowingly agree to something, your later complaints will go as far as this guy’s. BTW I’m emailing you a contract for the brooklyn bridge.
You know, there’s standby off and off off.
Hmm. But wouldn’t you still want to be able to do the *other* iPhone things, like play music and view your calendar? Seems to me you just want to turn off the wireless transceiver.
Or maybe you still want to be able to make and receive emergency phone calls, but just don’t want your iPhone to secretly be charging you a fortune.
Do people here realize that international roaming charges aren’t “AT&T screwing the consumer over?” AT&T doesn’t set those rates. International service providers charge AT&T for letting their customers use their network. AT&T can either absorb the cost, or pass it on to the customer. When a plan includes roaming, the home company makes the bet that you’ll spend most of your time in your home area, and won’t incur high roaming charges. Most “unlimited roaming” plans actually have a caveat saying you have to spend 60% or so of your minutes in your home area. (Again, read your contracts.)
If you want to blame anyone for the fact that roaming costs so much, blame the two-island cell provider with 8 customers in the carribean. They like it when ships full of cell totin’ Americans come through. Where do you think they make most of their money?
What’s that classic acronym?
RTFM!
I don’t think that this is a customer’s fault. So, if I don’t read my toaster’s manual, I will end up having an extra $100 on my unilities bill just because technological innovations made that damned thing consume six times more electricity and I did not bother to open that manual because I thought that all toasters are too easy to operate? Apple should stop those kind of practices.
@tcp100: Perhaps with AT&T and with small-time providers, but what about T-Mobile charging me a roaming fee while in Berlin connected to a network owned by a little company called….ummm….T-Mobile? I’m sure Deutsche Telekom could figure out a way to waive roaming fees when connecting from one subsidiary to another subsidiary if they really wanted to.
Apple and AT&T are both ghetto fabulous.
well, yes, RTFM.
BUT having particularly nasty and unexpected policies that are completely overcomplicated while promoting “simplicity” as a selling point isn’t the customer’s fault at all. i mean. maybe we SHOULD expect that all companies are malicious and out to rip us off, but can we really blame the naive for their ignorance?
Many people who buy Apple iPhones are not that tech savvy and even more people never bother reading through the manuals (personally I’ve never bothered reading any of the manuals that have come with the handful of cellphones I’ve owned over the last 10 years.) So it shouldn’t be difficult for Apple/AT&T to realize that this auto checking email feature that continually functions in standbye mode could cause many of their customers to receive massive bills that they didn’t expect. Something like this needs to be made very obvious to the consumer in more ways then just a mention inside a manual. Even if this guy gets stuck having to pay the bill, hopefully the press this gets will make more people aware of the issue.
There is something inherently broken about a $400 device racking up nearly $5000 in usage charges while it’s “off”*. Hell, there’s something wrong with being able to rack up $5,000 in charges during an entire 2-year cell phone contract.
* (When I put my computer in standby, it doesn’t download email. Why should a phone be any different?)
comparing a toaster to an iphone is like comparing apples and oranges.
puh-lease.
3 Iphones on a cruise? Maybe it’s just me, but couldn’t he have bought 1 phone and given $1000 to charity?
Well, this is how I see it. You live in Michigan (let’s say this is AT&T), pay you auto taxes & plate fees & it covers the costs of you driving on the roads. Then you make a trip to Ohio (lets say this is BT/British Telecom) & hit a Toll Road, you know, the ones you have to pay extra for. You may complain, because you shouldn’t have to pay again, but AT&T doesn’t own that road, just like the Network in Britain, BT does. This is why they can raise that Toll Fee to what ever they want. You may not like the AT&T Bill you get at the end of the month, but they had no say in these Roaming prices, BT did. So please, let’s quit bashing AT&T & Apple & take you problems up with the foreign company’s who set those prices.
@bossco: Couldn’t you just sell your computer and give the proceeds to charity? Your car? Wife?
“(When I put my computer in standby, it doesn’t download email. Why should a phone be any different?)”
Depends on what mode of standby. I believe my friends blackberry has a “standby” mode where the screen turns off to save power, but he still receives emails. My normal phone goes in to a standby that turns off the screens, but I can still receive phone calls.
@coan_net: Why’s that? Apple isn’t the carrier. That’s AT&T.
Carlos Mencia? Eww
While this guy deserves to lose the right to sign for himself on any future contract, I would hope that AT&T would offer to refund the money up to their cost of using the overseas networks. Clearly the guy didn’t know what he was doing. But just as a kid who calls up the home shopping network with his mom’s credit card can’t be held responsible, this guy should be given a little leeway. It will still cost him money (AT&T’s out of pocket expenses) and he’ll learn his lesson. But there’s no need, I feel, to make him feel like an even bigger moron than he has so ably demonstrated himself to be.