Verizon Makes Customers Wait Longer for Upgrades
U.S. carrier Verizon has changed its phone upgrade policies, making customers wait longer between upgrades. Until now, customers with a two-year agreement could upgrade at 20 months.
Now, customers will only be able to upgrade at 24 months, when their contract is up. The first customers impacted by this change are those whose contracts expire in January 2014.
In alignment with the terms of the contract, customers on a two-year agreement will be eligible for an upgrade at 24 months vs. today's early upgrade eligibility at 20 months. This change aligns the upgrade date with the contract end date and is consistent with how the majority of customers purchase new phones today. The first customers impacted by this change are customers whose contracts expire in January 2014. As always, customers may purchase a new phone at the full retail price at any time.
Verizon's main competitor, AT&T, allows customers to upgrade after 20 months, with an "early upgrade" allowed at an earlier time with a larger initial payment. Sprint offers upgrades after 20 months as well.
T-Mobile recently rolled out its new "uncarrier" plans, allowing customers to buy an iPhone 5 for $100 down plus 24 monthly payments of $20. Customers can buy a new phone at any time, but they will still be responsible for the monthly payments on prior phone purchases.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
... to push even more people to AT&T, Sprint, and Tmobile.
Cutting their own noses off to spite their face, IMO
"Not for another 4 months."
AT&T is inept. Verizon is evil. Take your pick, but they are different!