Who killed the iTunes phone: Apple, Motorola, or the carriers?

Ringback · 2026-08-14

In the middle of May 2005, the chief executive of Motorola told reporters that he was carrying the most anticipated phone in the world, and then declined to show it to them. Ed Zander, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, said there was “no resistance” from carriers to the iTunes phone Motorola had been promising for ten months. “I don't know where these rumors got started,” he said, adding: “When we did this deal last year, we knew exactly what carriers were interested in.” The phone would ship in July, he said. He had been playing with his for a few weeks, and he “loved” it. As product demonstrations go, it was the honest one: in May 2005 the iTunes phone was still best experienced as a rumor.

The one-writer industry blog then publishing at this address covered the claim within days, and did not buy it.

“Carriers Love iTunes Phone, says Moto CEO” · The Mobile Music Blog · 2005-05-19 09:52 · category: Devices · archive capture

The post pointed out what every reader of the trade press already knew: “no resistance” contradicted months of reporting that carriers were balking at a phone that cut them out of music revenue, and those reports were considerably easier to believe than the denial. (The hunger behind all this had been measured seven weeks earlier, when the same blog published a fake “world exclusive” iTunes phone — an April Fools' prank that dozens of sites believed, documented in our first article.) Four days after the post, Zander did produce the phone, demonstrating it at the Wall Street Journal's D conference on May 23 with photography prohibited; Engadget's report that day captured a one-megapixel camera, a built-in speaker, and no launch date.

Every checkable part of the May claim then failed. July came and went. The phone — the ROKR iTunes · launched 2005 client aboard the Motorola ROKR E1 — shipped on September 7, 2005, at $249.99 with a two-year contract, on exactly one American carrier, holding “up to 100 songs.” And the resistance Zander could not locate was documented in detail within weeks of the launch, by the people doing the resisting, on the record. So who killed the iTunes phone? The answer the record supports: it was a joint enterprise. Apple capped the phone to protect the iPod. Motorola delivered an old handset, late. But the decisive share belongs to the carriers — whose “no resistance” was in fact a pricing war they were busy winning. They resisted the phone's whole premise, a 99-cent song bought on a computer instead of a two-dollar song billed to the phone; they got their way; and getting their way cost them the customer. The rest of this article walks that evidence, case by case.

The carriers' case: music was their growth story, and the ROKR sold them nothing

To see why the carriers balked, look at what they were building instead. On October 31, 2005 — eight weeks after the ROKR launched — Sprint opened the first US store selling full songs over the air to a phone, the Sprint Music Store · opened 2005, at $2.50 a track, as Billboard reported that day. In January 2006 Verizon answered with V CAST Music · closed 2012: $1.99 for a song delivered over the air, $0.99 if the customer bought it on a PC first and cabled it across. Announcing the service, Verizon Wireless operating chief Lowell McAdam told Reuters that music would be the company's most important source of data-revenue growth — “I think this will double data as a percentage of revenue in the next two to three years,” he said. Music downloads were not a sideline the carriers were lukewarm about. They were the plan.

Against that plan, consider what the ROKR did. It filled itself over a USB cable from iTunes on a computer, from the iTunes Music Store · opened 2003 at Apple's flat $0.99 — and it could not buy a song over the air at all. Nothing touched the phone bill. The carrier sold the handset, carried the calls, and watched the music money walk past. Wired's November 2005 post-mortem on the project, the single best-sourced account of the fight, collected the carriers' position in their own words. Edward Kershaw, Vodafone's head of music: “To have a handset that prevents the over-the-air element from happening — that doesn't seem to have the interests of the carriers at heart.” Digital-music consultant Jim Griffin, more bluntly, told Wired the operators “hadn't fancied they'd sell a device that lets you go to iTunes without going through their tollbooth.” The same piece reported the price the tollbooth had in mind — $2.75 for an over-the-air track in the UK, nearly double the computer price, and possibly $3.00 in the US — propped up by labels demanding 60 percent of the take in the UK and 70 in the US.

The resistance shaped the launch calendar, not just the rhetoric. In March 2005, Motorola went to the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover with iTunes demonstrations on its stand and no iTunes phone; The Register reported that the company would not launch without one or two carriers committed, and that carriers saw little direct revenue in a device with no over-the-air sales. When the phone finally appeared in September, one carrier had signed: Cingular, then the largest in the country. Wired's account is that Cingular's own data-services group learned of the phone only weeks before a planned March launch, that the carrier concluded the iTunes association was worth having regardless — and that without its marketing support the ROKR would have been, in the magazine's word, DOA. One buyer, taking the phone partly for the halo: that is what “no resistance” looked like from inside. European operators, meanwhile, were running the same tollbooth logic to a stranger conclusion — signing musicians directly, a story the next article follows to the UK.

Apple's case: a 100-song cap is not an accident

The carriers wanted the phone weaker than iTunes. Apple, for different reasons, wanted it weaker than an iPod. The ROKR's defining specification — a hard ceiling of 100 songs, whatever the memory card could hold — sat in Apple's software, not Motorola's hardware. Nobody at Apple explained the number in public, and Steve Jobs declined to be interviewed for Wired's post-mortem, but the industry read it without difficulty. Patrick Parodi of the trade group Mobile Entertainment Forum put the consensus in one line: “It's obvious why Apple is doing this. They don't want to cannibalize the iPod.”

The arithmetic made the point unaided. On the same morning the ROKR was announced, Apple introduced the iPod nano: $249 for a model holding roughly 1,000 songs, next to a $249.99 phone holding 100. The company had built, priced and scheduled the comparison itself. Apple's press release called the ROKR the world's first mobile phone with iTunes; its own launch event made sure nobody mistook it for the world's best way to carry music. The phone was a lure — a way to put iTunes in front of phone buyers — not a successor to anything.

Apple's other contribution was price discipline. It held the song at $0.99 and kept FairPlay to itself, licensing carriers nothing they could build a premium store on. Jobs had already told the Journal's D conference in May 2005 what he thought of the carrier channel, in a line Wired preserved: Apple was “not very good at going through orifices to get to the end users.” Read as strategy rather than temperament, the ROKR was Apple conceding the smallest possible experiment to a partner model it already disliked, while protecting the iPod's flank at 100 songs exactly. Whether the cap alone sank the device — and what the 512 MB card, the USB 1.1 port and the rest of the hardware contributed — is the previous article's subject.

Motorola's case: a delayed, rebadged handset gave everyone something to blame

Motorola's contribution was the object itself. The ROKR E1 was a reworked Motorola E398, a candybar handset that had been on sale since 2004; GSMArena's period review — subtitle: “iTunes inside” — called it almost identical to the year-old model. The July 2004 announcement had promised iTunes phones in the first half of 2005. The first half of 2005 produced instead a CeBIT no-show, a string of revised ship dates, and Ron Garriques' summary of the partners' philosophical difference, given at a March CTIA press conference in remarks The Register relayed from Reuters: “Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday.” Motorola preferred to announce and then arrive; the ROKR managed neither, arriving more than a year after its own announcement.

When the reviews and the returns came in, Motorola's executives supplied the era's frankest running commentary on their own product. Zander, later that September, as reported by Macworld UK: “Screw the nano. What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?” A month later, to Bloomberg, his register had changed: the ROKR got “off to a little bit of a rough start”; “people were looking for an iPod and that's not what it is. We may have missed the marketing message there.” The same reporting put sales at 250,000 for the quarter and return rates, per period coverage, nearly six times the norm for a new handset. And to Wired, Garriques was still holding the company line on the question this article is about: “That is not based on anything that is fact, OK? I spend a lot of time talking with the carriers. I have never once had a conversation with a carrier in the US who showed any concern that the early versions of this don't have over-the-air downloading.” The denial sits in the same magazine story as Vodafone's music chief explaining the concern on the record — which is as close as the era came to settling the matter in one place.

Verdict: it was a conflict of interest, compounded by a cock-up

What follows is our judgement rather than a document, and is labelled accordingly. The sabotage theory — that Apple built the ROKR to fail so the iPhone could win — credits the cap with too much foresight; in 2005 Apple was protecting an iPod business, not clearing a runway, and the 100-song line was iPod-defense economics, stated as such by everyone but Apple. The cock-up theory — Motorola simply fumbled it — explains the handset but not the handcuffs. The phone was old and slow because Motorola built it badly and late; it was capped, single-carrier and sale-proof because two sets of partners each subtracted whatever threatened their own store.

That leaves the carriers, and the specific sense in which the title's question has an answer. The carriers killed the iTunes phone not by refusing it — one of them sold it — but by winning the argument it existed to settle. They kept the over-the-air song at $1.99 to $3.00 against a $0.99 world; they kept their tollbooth; they made sure the only iTunes phone that could exist was one too hobbled to matter. Every party got what it defended: Apple kept the iPod, the labels kept their premium, the carriers kept their billing relationship. The customer, offered a phone that did less than a $249 music player at the same price, kept walking. Victory all round, and no product.

Two years later, the carriers took the same phone on Apple's terms

On January 9, 2007, Apple announced its own phone, and Cingular — the ROKR's reluctant single buyer — signed as exclusive US carrier under a multi-year agreement. The terms, reconstructed the following January by Wired, were everything the industry had refused in 2005: complete Apple control of the phone's design, manufacture and marketing, roughly $10 a month from every iPhone subscriber's bill flowing back to Apple, and for the carrier, years of exclusivity — a deal Cingular's wireless chief, Stan Sigman, had signed months before Jobs first showed him a prototype. The iPhone carried no hundred-song cap and no carrier store. It filled itself from a computer, exactly the arrangement Vodafone's music chief had said failed to have the carriers' interests at heart; and when songs finally did go over the air, on Apple's Wi-Fi music store in September 2007, they cost $0.99 — the PC price, the premium abolished by the vendor the premium had been built against. The carriers loved that phone too, eventually.

Which returns this story to May 2005, and the phone Zander carried but would not show. It was a secret because Motorola and Apple still needed the carriers to want it, and the carriers, whatever the Tribune was told, did not. A year later the industry's most important phone was again invisible — by Wired's account, Cingular signed its iPhone agreement in mid-2006, months before Jobs showed Sigman the device — but the direction of the secrecy had reversed. In 2005, a handset maker hid a phone from reporters while it begged carriers to take it. In 2006, Apple hid a phone from the carrier even as the carrier signed for the right to sell it. The iTunes phone died in the space between those two sentences, and its killers — all three of them — spent the next decade living under the settlement.