Saturday Night Live ridicules AT&T iPhone call reliability

John Brownlee ()

Over the weekend, Seth Myers’ made a joke about the iPhone’s inability to actually place a call thanks to AT&T’s shoddy service during “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. The joke was terrible, but as terrible as it was, the entire audience immediately burst into hysterical laughter: they all knew what he was talking about.

See this, Apple? This is the moment when the unreliability of your choice of exclusive US iPhone carrier stops being merely the fodder for the complaints of mouth-breathing tech nerds like me, and evolves into a joke so mainstream that Saturday Night Live — a “comedy” show so old and dusty it could have been belched out of the womb of Bea Arthur — manages to get a chuckle from my grandmother out of it. And she doesn’t even own a cell phone.

Heck, just check out the look on Seth Myers’ face when he delivers the line. He works for Saturday Night Live, the most facile and dim-witted comedy show in the country, and he’s embarrassed by the obviousness of the gag. It’s like someone just handed him a knock-knock joke to read on the air. He actually rolls his eyes after he tells it.

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My SNL Script for Weekend Update

Apple, this has gone far enough. The iPhone — the best and most popular phone on the market — is now a punchline, thanks to AT&T’s consistent failure to get its network together. Drop this turd. Offer the iPhone on any US network that can handle it.

13 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Humor, iPhone, News | Tagged: , , , |

  • http://deoclicianocgiportfolio.wordpress.com Deocliciano Okssipin Vieira

    How come a company that used o be the sole phone company in the USA be this incompetent?

    They should learn with the lazy car industry, that still live in the past.

  • Dan

    The joke was a JOKE! There is no need to get worked up over this. There was no need to insukt the show because this
    weeks show wasn’t very good. Lately SNL has been hit and miss, when the jokes are funny they are very funny.

  • http://www.apple.com Anony

    I can’t fully understand why make the iPhone exclusive to certain company in the first place.. Was it to reduce the price tag? People are already paying more than that in what they’re losing over this pre-historic company from the dead..

  • Allan

    Still never a dropped call on AT&T. Is this a NY-specific issue?

  • nixtr

    I have criticized JB’s harsh mercilessness before, but I have to give him props for putting the screws to AAPL and T for this one. They are unlikely bedfellows, and the monogamy must stop!

    I have had a dropped call in Seattle from my iphone 4 times with full bars in a 20 minute conversation. The “solution” is to turn off 3G and use the edge network to place calls. Apparently, the network uses the 3G data stream to make calls if you have 3G turned on, but it tends to drop enough packets, that the live stream fails. I am not about to keep digging into the menu 3 pages deep to toggle my network on and off, just because ATT can’t get their shit straight. So I will just continue to be part of the joke.

  • Brian

    To make matters worse verizon is now openly bashing the iPhone to promote stood, etc. I’d been hoping that apple and verizon were moving closer to a deal, but now that seems unlikely. Apple and verizon have both blown it on this one and hurt their customers in the process.

  • Daniel

    iPhone should open up to T-Mobile USA in 2010. Screw Verizon, just another huge bloated unresponsive carrier as bad as AT&T.

  • PulSamsara

    “The joke was terrible, but as terrible as it was, the entire audience immediately burst into hysterical laughter”

    But yet “The Joke was terrible” ?

    —————————

    Fanboys are a joke… lol

  • PulSamsara

    “He works for Saturday Night Live, the most facile and dim-witted comedy show in the country”
    ^
    What everyone on the butt end of a joke claims. Hahahaaaaa….
    Almost as cliche as stating “SNL used to be funny” and that “Now it’s irrelevant” as we comment on the news it made…. lol

    So fanboys… the iPhone is the Sarah Palin of the phone world… funny stuff.

  • Allan

    T-Mobile? You’ve got to be kidding. I had VoiceScream before it morphed into T-Mobile and it was the worst service ever. Had to stand outside to make and answer calls. When it worked at all.

  • Mystakill

    @nixtr,

    Jailbreak your phone & install SBSettings. Then you can swipe your status bar and enable disable 3G and other settings with a single click.

  • sam

    what are you talking about? AT&T is not perfect, that’s for sure… but stop being such a fanboy and blame it all on her – as if the iPhone itself has no problems…

    Just to remind you – the iPhone was picked by CNet UK as the worst phone of the year (as a phone… the device you suppose to call with) and they have no AT&T problems in the UK!

  • Gregg

    Here’s the thing about blaming the network. Before the iPhone, my AT&T Blackberry Curve worked great and hardly ever dropped a call. So, I’ve been assuming it’s really the iPhone “radio” and not the AT&T network. As a handheld computer, the iPhone is great; as a phone, it is the worst I’ve ever had. I’ll try turning off the 3G to see if that helps.
    I welcome comments on the iPhone vs AT&T 3G network as the problem.