I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack, but if your bet is this a short term stop gap until the market is more “unlocked” - less of an issue, and better to get the direct market learnings along the way.

> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone.

In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.

The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.

> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack

They went to Verizon first but were turned down. Apple needed distribution, which meant partnering with an established carrier.

Regarding "owning the entire stack" didn't make any sense in 2007, especially for a company that was new to the cell phone business.

Three years later, the first iPhone with Apple's silicon was the iPhone 4 with the A4 processor.

Context for Europeans: the US mobile market was basically total vendor lock-in hell up until the mid-2010s. There were only two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile[1]) you could bring-your-own-phone with, the other two (Verizon and Sprint[2]) only allowed the phones they sold on their network. Phone service and plans were bundled together.

In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.

One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.

And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".

Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:

1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks

2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]

3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs

[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.

[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point

[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile

[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards

[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"