Telecom CEOs are people and have feelings, too. Just ask AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson about unlimited data and iMessage and you’ll see him get quite distraught, as in these two quotes from The New York Times (via Cult of Mac):

“My only regret was how we introduced pricing in the beginning, because how did we introduce pricing? Thirty dollars and you get all you can eat,” he said in the on-stage interview at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference on Wednesday. “And it’s a variable cost model. Every additional megabyte you use in this network, I have to invest capital.”

What about the revenue gold mine known as texting…20¢ for a couple of bytes of data?

“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model,” he said. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

Maybe he needs some sad music to help reflect on the lesson he’s learned?

I remember the headlines about a smoking, defective iPhone last fall. As it turns out, a large screw was left floating around inside of the phone during an unauthorized repair and punctured the battery. In other words, don’t try to repair your iPhone yourself.

Besides the fact that an iMac just looks good on an inexpensive birch effect VIKA AMON table top, IKEA and Apple have been doing things their own way in retail in Asymco’s Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt provided a lengthy comparison (via The Brooks Review):

Apple offers a place where people can discover and get answers about technology without the pressure of making a purchase. The job is to simplify that which is complex for a price premium.

IKEA offers a place where people can get exactly what they need exactly when they need it. The only downside is that “some assembly is required”. In a way, their job is to introduce some complexity in exchange for convenience and a discount.

I agree, but I also find IKEA to be a place where you can browse without any sort of pressure (although their staff seems plenty helpful, much like those at Apple Stores), and sometimes waste time just looking at all the different items.

I think this was the next logical step for The Daily, much like Flipboard was iPad-only and then moved to the iPhone, too. The free articles should get some new people interested, and it would be nice to see this carried over to the iPad version:

The Daily is free to download, and you can read a selection of articles from the app for free every day. To get complete access to our award-winning content including articles, photos, videos, and infographics, subscribe for only $1.99/month or $19.99/year. Subscribers to the The Daily on tablets get the iPhone app for free! Simply login to the mobile app using the same registration as The Daily’s tablet app, and your subscription will sync automatically.

Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge:

…Approximate measurements are 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm—a 10mm jump in height, nearly 2mm reduction in thickness, and virtually identical width. According to our source, Apple will make one major change to the rear casing, adding a metal panel to the central back of the new iPhone. This panel will be flat, not curved, and metal, not ceramic…The change in height will include a lengthening of the prior 3.5” screen to roughly 4” on the diagonal. As the new iPhone won’t widen, this appears to confirm that Apple will change the new iPhone’s aspect ratio for the first time since the original iPhone was introduced in 2007, adding additional pixels to the top and bottom of the screen…

Apple will also introduce its new Dock Connector on the new iPhone. The new port will be a little larger than the bottom speaker or microphone hole on the iPhone 4/4S. It’s believed to have fewer pins than the prior 30-pin Dock Connector, perhaps only 16, and the shape of the hole is apparently closer to a pill shape than the prior rounded rectangle…

I don’t get too crazy about Apple-related rumors these days, but this seems a bit too far out there (although iLounge is fairly reliable). Still, a lot of people thought the “found” iPhone 4 prototype was a bit too weird.