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by dcminter·1y ago·view on hn ↗
> ... a willingness to promise whatever carriers and OEMs wanted to close a distribution deal...

That always struck me as one of the more impressive things that Jobs achieved with the original iPhone - getting buy-in from Cingular to do things Apple's way and not Cingular's. Pre-iPod Apple probably couldn't have done it.

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...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity.

It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.