And so it begins. The promised truce among wireless carriers is over.
After vowing to avoid a repeat of the blistering iPhone price war of last year, AT&T will fire the first shot — offering a free iPhone with the purchase of another, for customers who also subscribe to its DirecTV satellite service.
The buy-one-get-one-free promotion starts Friday and applies to the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, among other phones. AT&T hasn't said whether the deal will be extended to Apple Inc.'s most expensive phone ever — the $999 iPhone X, aka 10 — which marks a decade since the company entered the phone business.
Under pressure to find new customers in a market where every adult already has at least one phone, the wireless companies duked it out with cutthroat pricing on the iPhone last year. The giveaways took a toll on margins, costing about $200 per subscriber in the second half of 2016, according to Jefferies Group LLC.
"We had to over-promote" to compete with plans from rivals such as T-Mobile US, but that further improved customer loyalty, Verizon Communications Inc. Chief Executive Lowell McAdam said in an interview Wednesday at Bloomberg's Sooner Than You Think conference in New York.
T-Mobile, which was the first and most aggressive on price last year, said it was steering clear this time around. Instead, the company plans to offer a $300 trade-in credit for customers buying the iPhone X, as well as the new 8 and 8 Plus. The trade-in must be an iPhone 6 or newer.
The other top carriers have been relatively restrained so far.
• Sprint Corp. Chief Executive Marcelo Claure, in a series of GIFs on Twitter Tuesday, introduced a half-off lease for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. The deal requires a trade-in of the iPhone 7.
