Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

mcdj

macrumors G3
Original poster
Jul 10, 2007
8,972
4,225
NYC
AT&T: Hey Steve. Look we know the gig is almost up with the iPhone. We're gonna lose our shirts when Verizon steals the show.

Steve: Not my problem. You had a good run.

AT&T: Ok, well at least throw us a bone with this iPad thing...

Steve: Such as...?

AT&T: The data plan. It's $15 or $30. Most people are gonna go for the $15 plan.

Steve: Right. And?

AT&T: 250mb a month is plenty of data for most people, but we need more $30 subscribers.

Steve: What am I supposed to do about that?

AT&T: Glve Safari a tiny cache. Like 25kb. Every time someone opens a new window, all the other pages will have to reload...

Steve: I know what a cache is you dolt.

AT&T: ...the faster they burn through their 250mb, the faster we can bill for more data.

Steve: Fine. Apple gets 20%.

AT&T: Deal.
 
After hearing about how everyone here blazed through 250MB in 10 minutes, I signed up for the unlimited plan. However after a week of normal usage, I've only used up 90MB.
 
Steve wouldn't settle for 20%... Otherwise I'd have believed you were in the room at the time.
 
250MB is plenty for some use patterns. Basically if you'll be using 3g only as a bridge between wifi zones, and if you aren't streaming video, it's fine. There are a lot of people in the world who mainly want email and other bandwidth-light applications. The $15 policy is a good backup for certain situations.

I went ahead and got the $30 plan because I know that where I want to use it, there's usually either no wifi or weak and unreliable wifi. For instance, the Amtrak train I was on for 3 hours Tuesday and 3 hours Wednesday has free wifi ... but it's slow, and they block some sites/ports. After trying it for a few minutes, I decided I'd be better off with 3g, so I turned wifi off.

If you're in doubt, my advice would be to try 250MB and see how it does for you. It might be enough, and if it's not, you can sign up for the $30 plan without losing anything. If you use your 250MB in 15 days, then that means you sign up for unlimited 15 days later than you otherwise would have, and the money is a wash. If you use your 250MB faster than 15 days, then you lose a few dollars, but no big deal. If it lasts longer than 15 days, you come out ahead.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

umm, ok, thanks for stopping by.
 
Would you be happier if I'd entertained the conspiracy theory? The two plans serve different needs. If you plan to use it every day and watch streaming video etc, 250MB makes no sense for you. I wonder if people would have been happier if Apple and AT&T offered only the $30 plan with no cheaper option. Seems like some people who obviously have different needs get hung up on that plan.
 
You left out the part where the data plan costs half what a laptop 3G data plan normally does on most carriers. $30 a month/unlimited is a great deal and I'd guess that anyone who posts here would usually have far too much usage to stay under the 250MB limit no matter how Safari works.
 
Originally I was going to get only the 250MB plan, but then I though about it and got the unlimited plan instead. The way i figured was I would be playing with it and showing it off to my friends and coworkers, and would probably blast past that 250MB pretty fast, first. Second, I figured that if I got the 250MB plan and went over I'd have to pay $45 for both plans eventually. And lastly, it's still only half the going rate for an unlimited 3G plan on any other network.

In summary, I don't really care if there's a conspiracy between Apple and AT&T or not as long as I'm the one who benefits from the deal.

If you're worried about the Safari issue needing to reload every time you go to a different tab, you should try the Atomic Browser. It does have to reload the page every time you close and reopen the app, but it doesn't have to reload the tabs at all if you leave it open. Other than that one thing, it's an awesome app!
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.