the new iPhone may be cool, but...

Well I loathe vendor lock-in, but to be fair to Apple, the price of the iPhone 3G is subsidized so that they aren't really making (or aren't making much) money if you buy one and take it to another carrier. The price of the 8GB iPhone is $199. The price of an 8 GB iPod Touch (Basically the iPhone without the phone/GPS parts) is $299. So yeah, they don't want you taking it to another network, they want you to sign up with AT&T so they get their cut of the monthly fees and make that price back up. Also, AT&T customized their network a bit for the iPhone. The most prominent example of that is the visual voicemail thingey, but presumably they've also beefed it up a good bit, because iPhone users on average consume tons of bandwidth, and that's only going to go up with the iPhone 3G. So Apple doesn't want people buying the iPhone, using it on a network it's not optimized for, and having suboptimal results. Should that be their decision to make? Well, that's debatable. But it's basically their MO. OS X can run on PCs now, but they don't support that because they like having control of both the hardware and software so they can be sure of the user experience. And that is kind of nice. And it doesn't hurt that they make a ton of money off the hardware, too.

Yeah, and I don't disagree with you. I think this is more AT&T though, because the first generation one, they let you buy just the phone, and then people did unlock it and used another network. Apple was getting all their revenue, but AT&T wasn't reaping the benefits of what was supposed to be an exclusive partnership. So now by subsidizing it so that Apple doesn't make a full profit unless the customer signs up with AT&T, they've given them an incentive to make it harder for people to avoid the contract. And I'm sure Apple looked at the customers they stood to lose from that, versus what they were making from AT&T by being exclusive, and decided they were better off sticking with AT&T and screwing the customers. So is it crappy? Yeah. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I don't blame the companies, not really. I wouldn't expect any better from them, so it's hard to be too mad about it. What we really need are laws to outlaw those kinds of abusive contracts. Apple isn't partnering exclusively with one carrier in some other countries where that sort of thing is illegal. If we had some better consumer protection laws over here, they wouldn't be doing it in the U.S. either.