iPad

iPad:

The iPhone was the only thing that made AT&T's customer base grow last quarter. without iPhone, they would have lost over 400,000 customers.

I believe that AT&T needs Apple desperately. This gives Apple quite a lot of leverage... And, I also believe, is why Apple got AT&T to offer the $15 month plan for iPad.

That Verizon-compatible CDMA iPhone we keep seeing rumors about almost certainly exists as a prototype: it is a sword of Damocles hanging over AT&T's head. Think it isn't real? Remember that Apple had an x86 build of Mac OS X for many years before the Intrl transition, as a skunkworks project, and that team routinely filed x86 bugs that the main OS X team had to fix even if they never occurred on PowerPC. Word of that project got out back when the Quicksilver G4 was the hot ticket...

The flip side is that Apple would surely hate to drop a relationship in which they can call the shots with such impunity...