So No iPhone 5 For Me Then…

Last year O2 did a very sweet deal for iPhone owners whereby they would allow someone in the middle of a two-year contract to pay off their remaining months at a set price of £20 per month in order that they could set up a new contract and get the then-new iPhone 4S. This I thought was a totally fair way of doing it; after all Apple charges a fortune for the handsets and the carriers have to pay for them before they start making money for themselves. Twenty quid a month basically pays for the handset if you got it for free (which I did), O2 keeps their customers, don’t lose any money on the handsets, I sell the old handset for as much as it cost me to cancel the old contract and everyone is a winner.

Flash forward to now? Nobody wins. No fast-track upgrades are available. If I want to buy my way out of my contract I have to pay my full monthly cost for however many months remaining, despite the fact that I want to open a new contract with O2, effectively meaning that I pay double. If I did this it would be less than £100 cheaper that just buying the handset from Apple, but the whole question is academic because I can’t afford to do either. Added to this there is the absolute pantomime O2 put on for those people who wished to pre-order an upgrade for one reason or another. This O2 community thread is 1,200 comments of people going “please tell us things, O2”! They had no reliable information, each source of information (website, community website managers, store advisors, customer service line operators) had different stories, it took them a full day longer than everyone else to be able to start doing pre-orders; they couldn’t even tell people what the tariffs were going to be! Now, O2 have a long history of ball sing up iPhone launches and even within that history this was a strong showing. The individual advisors could only tell customers what they’ve been told, it was an utter lack of preparation and management and a more senior level that did for them. The customer service manager should really fall on their sword, or at least, someone’s sword.

So what’s to do? Well, short of a small lottery win there is no rational way I can afford an iPhone 5. For the first time since the original iPhone in 2007, I won’t have the new shiny. I cannot begin to describe how much this pains me. Gadgets are my hobby; this is like not being able to go plane-spotting because the taxi fare to the airport is too expensive. It looks like I’m staying with the iPhone 4S for the next year, which is fine, it’s a decent phone. It’s just not the newest one. And in a year? Bye bye O2. I’m a fickle, spiteful bastard, and you have wronged me unnecessarily. So fuck you and your incompetence and greed. Next year you lose a customer of nearly a decade. Am I being overly sensitive here? Am I being that thing I most hate (OK, one of the many things I most hate) an entitlement dick? Do let me know if you think I am…