Ask HN: Why hasn't Apple bought a cell carrier like AT&T or Verizon?

This would be like cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Apple profits from phone sales. The more distribution channels, the more phones they can sell, and more organizations spending the money to advertise iPhones.

If Apple bought a cell carrier, they would be in direct competition with the other carriers. Worst-case, they would likely get dropped from the other's lineups. The less worse case, they wouldn't get advertising/promotion from their competition.

> but appear to strictly avoid showing their products in those shows.

Apple has 'villains can't use iPhones' rule. Directors are not allowed to use Apple product placement for villains.

That depends on their negotiations, no? Fi has been fantastic for me in the years I've had it, far better than first party AT&T or Verizon for my use cases.

Presumably that's because Google was able to negotiate favorable terms from T-Mobile. I assume Apple would be even better at that.

Huh? Just offering a cell phone plan doesn't mean that Apple becomes Google overnight?

I would love to see a first party Apple cell plan. It'd be better if they owned the whole network, but a MVNO would be better than nothing.

That doesn't mean Apple has to copy Google in any other ways.

Weirdly enough though.

It's super expensive, only a real option for emergencies and not a mass market.

Either they expect low orbit sat to be the next thing or it's a pure diversity topic because yeah what else should they do

why would they?

It's already a fully integrated end-to-end communication device.

They don't know how to operate it, they don't care about millions of people complaining about shitty network, they don't have to handle internationalization and they would position themselves against whoever carrier is before/after at&t, Verizon and T-Mobile.

They make huge margins by making hardware. This type of margin is not happening at carriers.

And no just because companies like Verizon do have daughters in other countries they are not global. So apple would also need to expand to all countries.

I only see a lot of downsides and not a single upside.

Why would Apple, the incredibly profitable, cash-happy company that could arguably be called the most successful business in the world, choose to take on billions of dollars in debt and the responsibilities of physical infrastructure maintenance?

Apple is "hitting walls" expanding their business because they have captured nearly the entirety of their potential customer base. They don't need to keep expanding.

Antitrust; antitrust; antitrust; but also, debt, debt, and more debt. Verizon? $115 billion of it. T-mobile? $78 billion. AT&T? $126 billion. It gets even better when 6G networks start knocking!

So let's make the case to shareholders: We buy Verizon, with a $180 billion market cap, for a substantial premium; assume $115 billion of their debt; there's an investment into 6G on the horizon; this hopefully won't anger any major players in the Android market (e.g. Samsung) from abandoning the network; and this will somehow magically reach the break-even point. Obviously, absurd.