FFEJWORLD:

Think about this:

The iPhone moves the phone to the shelf stock position. They go into AT&T or the Apple store and buy the phone. No used car salesman tactics, just buy it and leave. Then in the privacy of your own home, in the comfort of your iTunes, you pick the rate plan you want. You set up the phone, you register it with the carrier. You.

The carrier becomes completely irrelevant in the transaction. Apple’s built a back end to iTunes to do all the work that those used car salesmen do in the AT&T store. And it will plug all the billing info into AT&T’s system.

Shelf stock, no need for salesperson intervention. We already have this for prepaid cell phones, but now we have it for the high line. Well, the current high line. Apple reserves the “i” for mid line products these days, but it used to denote the low line (the original iMac). We might see an iPhone 2.0, but we might also see a MacPhone. And a MacPhone Pro.

Hypothetically, the cost of sale for the phones goes down, and the amount the carrier subsidizes for the phone goes down. So initially AT&T is gonna be creaming it’s jeans over the profit. Apple has a two year lock in with AT&T to perfect the system, and start building the back ends for talking to the other GSM carriers.

Depending how smoothly the rollout goes tonight and next week, this could mark the end of the traditional American cell phone system, and mark the beginning of a phone centric one. It could also spell the demise of a lot of used car salesmen jobs. People hate the used car sales ploys and dealing with people who can’t answer their questions or fix their problems at phone stores. Almost everyone is going to want to just buy a phone. There’s going to be pressure on AT&T and the other carriers to duplicate the iPhone experience across their line (and no, you don’t need a web back end, you could do it using the phone itself). Which would drive actual cost of sales down more. I can see where the carriers could close their own stores, push the phones out through the big box stores. Cost of sales hits rock bottom, and they have to compete on network features, coverage, cost, phone subsidy and heavens to murgatroyd, customer service. It’s a great fantasy, except for the potential of lost jobs.