Yesterday during the WWDC, Apple announced some new iPhone hardware.  During the keynote two new features were announced, MMS support and Internet tethering.  During the announcement, it was mentioned that AT&T would support these features later this summer.

After the keynote, AT&T announced the pricing and upgrade information for existing iPhone 3G customers.  Long story short, if you have owned your 3G iPhone for less than 18 months, it would cost you $399 for the new 16GB model and $499 for the 32GB model.  If you have had your phone for longer than 18 months, then you qualify for the $199/$299 pricing.

Based on various tweets and blog postings, people are pretty upset with AT&T.  I can understand being upset for not supporting MMS and tethering at launch, but I think people are overreacting to the upgrade policy.  When you got the iPhone 3G you signed a 2 year contract for that phone, so they are not required to let you out of your current contract just so that you can get the latest and greatest iPhone.  We can definitely thank phone subsidies for this as this is a pretty standard practice across the mobile industry.  When the Storm 2 comes out for Verizon, those customers are going to have to go through a similiar process if they want to get the newest version.

Could you imagine life without phone subsidies?  I sure wouldn’t want to?  Yes, I know we marry ourselves to a carrier for 2 years, but it gives us the option to own incredible “phones”.  I use the term “phones” losely because these days these phones are turning into mini super computers.  With this capability, comes a price that would prevent most consumers from ever even coming close to owning these devices.

So please, lets move past all the griping about AT&T and how they mis-treating loyal customers, and lets start focusing on the countdown to the new 3.0 OS that will give existing customers most of the new features that are part of the iPhone 3G S.