Apple (AAPL) has finally perfected its ability to be on the front page of the news every day. Not long after it announced better-than-expected earnings for its last quarter, Steve Jobs demonstrated the company’s new iPad tablet computer. Jobs even visited The New York Times to convince its staff that Apple’s latest product would be the next step in his company’s march to change the world of consumer electronics.

Jobs had barely made it back to Cupertino when Apple leaked news that it would release two new versions of its iPhone this summer. One will run the CDMA technology, which is the system that Verizon Wireless uses. There have been rumors for over a year that AT&T (T) would lose its exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in the US and that speculation is about to become fact.

The news that Apple will launch new versions of the iPhone is really no news at all.  The Wall Street Journal confirmed Apple’s plans today. Jobs & Co. routinely update all of their products. Those updates rarely have profound effects on Apple’s partners. That is not true with the CDMA iPhone. AT&T’s ox is about to be gored.

It is impossible to tell what AT&T has spent to buy iPhones to sell its customers and what it has invested to market the Apple product. The phone company will not say for several reasons, one of which is that the sum is almost certainly embarrassingly high. The moment Verizon Wireless gets its hands on the iPhone, the value of AT&T’s investment began to plunge

Apple always had the upper hand in its relationship with AT&T and used it to get remarkable sums of money in exchange for the cellular carrier’s exclusive deal to sell the iPhone. Once the deal began to become less lucrative, which was probably the last time Apple asked for more money to maintain the status quo and was turned down, Jobs understood that he could make more money with two or three partners. AT&T could not walk away from its huge investment, and Verizon could not afford to pass up a chance to use its rival’s most prized product against it.

AT&T could not have done anything to change the outcome of its relationship with Apple. The consumer electronics and computer company always had the upper hand because its product was more valuable than AT&T’s distribution platform. What was almost certain at the beginning of the Apple/AT&T partnership has now come to pass. AT&T paid for a benefit that would never last.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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