Congrats, AT&T. You reacted (FINALLY) the correct way to Verizon's ads: with ads.

Now make a better ad.

Oh wait, AT&T spent all their money on a lawsuit against Verizon and this is all they had left.

Anyway, the ad basically says "We have the iPhone and our 3G is faster." That's the only important smartphone that AT&T has and nobody else does.

On the faster network side of things, I'll side with AT&T, as long as you aren't in an urban area. As long as I'm not in the middle of the city I can get a little over 2 Mbps down and a little over 1 Mbps up with my AT&T aircard (not on contract...I'd never make such an egregious mistake). However in town latency skyrockets and throughput plummets, provided the town I'm in is big enough to have a few iPhones floating around.

So in areas where there are people, AT&T's network tends to suck, compared to Verizoon, Sprint or even T-Mobile 3G. however out in the country, ironically, if AT&T has 3G it's definitely the fastest when compared with VZW and Sprint.

That said, T-Mobile actually has the fastest 3G in the US, and it'll be getting faster soon (3.6 -> 7.2 -> 21 with a 5.76 Mbps upload capacity coming soon) though their coverage has a ways to go. Also, while we're at it, let's not forget Sprint/Clearwire's WiMAX venture. They're advertising it as 4x faster than 3G, and it is as long as you can get a signal. At least the problems with Clear are reception/buildout related rather than network overload and sue-everyone related.

I'm guessing Comcast CATV will be required for this one? If so, what tier? If it requires anything above basic (I'm sure it does) I'll stamp a big red FAIL on it and move on. Would be usedul if it worked for internet-only customers like myself; my 22/5 connection needs a workout now and then.

AT&T has had 7.2-capable devices for a few years. My USBConnect 881 that I got a year and some ago is 7.2-capable, though it doesn't support 5.76 Mbit HSPA uploads.

Nice speeds, though WiMAX is better.

Wonder who'll get to my hometown first...Clear 4G or T-Mobile 7.2 HSPA. Clear would be the winner there on speed but if T-Mobile gets there first...

I glossed over the omission of FW on the MacBook while reading the specs. Looks like I'll be holding off on getting a new Mac portable until Apple re-includes the port amid the whining of thousands of folks like myself who actually want a decent machine for video (and don't tell me the 2.26 GHz processor isn't decent...nor the 1066MHz memory...nor the graphics card) that doesn't cost them $1200 just because they want OS X on it.

Also, c'mon Apple, does it really cost THAT much to include a second audio port in your system? Now you can't get a 13" Mac portable with dedicated line-in and line-out ports...you instead get a pathetic admixture of the two.

Sure, people will buy the new MacBook in spite of these faults, but this move on Apple's part is simply one of "people who want to do more than look at photos and check their email must pay the Apple tax." Just like when they intoduced the unibody MacBook Pro without a FW port.

What's even more annoying is that Apple did this while realizing that the couldn't possibly commit such an atrocity on the Mac mini. Now I'm not saying they should take line-in and FW800 out of that computer, but the Mini certainly costs less than a MacBook...and includes both ports!

In case anyone's counting, here are the differences that make the current MacBook Pro cost $200 more than the MacBook (again, Apple is playing the product differentiation game here more than anything else, so they don't have to do a spec bump on their MBPs):

1. Aluminum enclosure, saving 0.2 pounds on weight
2. 90GB SMALLER hard drive
3. SD card slot
4. Firewire 800 port

That's it. The cost difference between 160GB and 250GB hard drives is about the same as the cost of an SD card reader, and adding a FW 800 port to the logic board can't be all that expensive.

Why does Apple shy away from the concept of a replacement for the 12" PowerBook: cheap(ish), small, powerful, with all the ports you need. How is that so hard?

Freakin' bean counters, man.

MSDNAA is what we have here on-campus. Some departments get Pro for free, others don't.

From what I've heard T-Mobile has the slowest 3G network currently (in bits per second in practice) though reliability AFAIK is okay.

This should catapult them into "fastest in the pack", provided they have 20 Mbps of backhaul per tower. If they do, and if they can get their service rolled out to the places I frequent (Denver metro and central TX) before Sprint/Clear/Comcast get WiMAX to those places, I'm definitely picking up one of their mobile broadband cards.

I just hope that the caps on HSPA+ will be higher, though since we're talking 3.95G (:p) that probably won't happen.

On my (Early 2009 white) MacBook the update was, as you said, about 9 MB. On my (first-gen aluminum) iMac however the update was ~75 MB.

I want one. But it's probably too expensive :/

Can't reply to Dogtown directly, but I know for a fact that the only Sprint handsets that can't be activated with old SERO plans (but can with the new Everything Plus Referral Program) are the Samsung Instinct series and the Palm Pre. My Touch Pro activated just fine, and it's a newish smartphone.