[Epic 4G General] bitbang3r:
If true, this shows how completely and utterly out of touch Samsung's executives are with reality.

First of all, the whole theory that a 2.2-Vibrant(non-4G) would "devalue" the 4G. EVEN IF the only difference between the old and new Vibrant were the front camera and 4G, how many users likely to notice or care about whether or not the current Vibrant has 2.2 would *honestly* choose to buy the old model instead of the new one, even if it were a $50 difference between the two? People who buy $50 phones or wait months to get an old model on closeout for "free" with 2-year contract aren't the people who buy phones like the Epic, Vibrant, and the rest of the Galaxy S family. People in "our" category might ******* about a $50 difference... but we'll pay it anyway, because we know that if we don't, we'll be miserable and regret it daily for the next year or two.

Ditto, for customers who already own a Vibrant. In the entire United f***ing States, there *might* be 10,000 Vibrant owners who'll dump one and buy a Vibrant4G at full retail just to get 4G and/or the front camera. And I'll bet that a hefty subset of that group are T-Mobile employees whose "full" cost (after employee discount) is roughly what the rest of us would pay for a subsidized phone with contract, anyway. Now, having satisfied that group... how many more existing Vibrant customers do they REALLY think they're going to get by withholding 2.2 from owners of older Vibrants? Especially considering the abundance of custom ROMs.

The rationale becomes even more absurd when you consider the case of withholding 2.2 from Epic4G owners. I'm sure if you combed America hard enough, you might find a few Epic4G owners who'd dump it, pay the ETF to Sprint, switch to T-Mobile, and buy a Vibrant4G... but scratch a bit deeper, and I'd bet a major body part that the overwhelming majority of THAT group consists of users who probably wanted to switch anyway, and the existence of the Vibrant4G was more of an enabling excuse and rationale than an actual *reason*.

Companies like Samsung just don't seem to "get it". Consumers might chuck a $25 mp3 player to buy a newer, cooler one in 4 months. Statistically NOBODY chucks an expensive pocket computer whose marginal replacement cost exceeds $400 for an incremental improvement 4-6 months down the line. The closest ANY phone has probably come to motivating early switching was the Evo, and that was basically because the Evo was roughly twice as good as the Hero in almost every meaningful way, and worse in basically none. Users MIGHT be induced to switch early for 10x faster data, twice the cpu speed, 50% more resolution on a screen nearly twice the size, and a lot more ram. Users are NOT going to casually switch because one has 2.2 and one is officially stuck at 2.1... they're just going to root, reflash, and promise their deity of choice that they'll never buy another Samsung phone again.

If anything, T-Mobile is the biggest loser, because if true, this means that Samsung is effectively doing its best to devalue T-Mobile's inventory of existing unsold Vibrants. Now, if T-Mobile charges $10/month more for 4G service, that might merit trying harder to induce otherwise-indifferent new purchasers to go with the 4G model instead of the old model... but if it's the same price per month for service, it's to T-Mobile's own advantage to all but encourage new customers who are indifferent between the two to go with the old one... it's one less phone for T-Mobile to write off as a loss and send to a spare parts warehouse to gather dust until it ends up in a landfill or gets dumped on a new penny-pinching customer who only cares that it's "free" with 2-year contract, and one fewer customer who'll start abusing youtube as a source of free in-car music on demand (soaking up lots of bandwidth in the process).

This is the kind of logic that leaves me wondering how some big corporations can even stay in business. I worked for one a couple of years ago where we were ordered to *immediately* dispose of a hundred or so old laptops -- at a cost of $250 apiece -- instead of keeping them piled on a few shelves in a storage room in case we came up with a good use for them someday (like using them as thin clients for call center operators... something we had, in fact, done before). The executive rationale? The accountants complained that they were "costing" us $5,000/month to store based on the square-foot value of the space they were taking up in the closet, and somebody's wet dream fantasies about the value of that space. The thing is, we were about ~15 employees in a warehouse-like facility almost a square city block in size that was 95% empty (built during the dotcom boom, then the company was stuck with it due to a glut of similar buildings nearby). So, we burned $25,000 in the name of emptying off a 4x6 foot steel shelving unit, basically to humor the delusional fantasies of a faceless borg more concerned with a checklist item than getting actual work done and bringing in revenue. Madness. Pure, faceless, bureaucratically-driven out of control insanity. :mad: