Online iPhone sales return to the Big Apple

After word leaked to the Internet that AT&T was preventing residents of one of the largest and most populous metropolises in the country from buying iPhones online thanks to wide scale fraud, every hour that passed without iPhones available on AT&T’s official website was further egg-on-the-face of a carrier that has, in recent months, become synonymous with incompetence and bad customer service. There was no way it could have lasted for long, and so it didn’t: AT&T is now selling iPhones through their official site again.

In truth, the outage probably didn’t affect anyone, since iPhones were still available at AT&T retail outlets, Apple stores, and Apple’s own website. This was hardly the great iPhone drought of 2009. Still, it’s indicative of a sort of prevalent culture of casual incompetence on AT&T’s part: in the face of unspecified website fraud, AT&T opted to take the iPhone off their website entirely instead of quickly mending the hole in their own fraud detection procedures, inconveniencing their customers in the process.

Sad to say, that appears to be business as usual at Ma Bell, and it’s just another public relations fubar to set Papa Jobs’ eyeteeth aching as he considers Apple’s soon-to-lapse exclusivity deal with AT&T. Is anyone willing to take a bet on Apple re-signing that agreement, after two years of the iPhone being hobbled by a brazenly inept and skinflint wireless carrier? Apple wants the best business partners around, and it ought to be plenty clear to everyone right now that that’s just not AT&T.

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[via AT&T]

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