Welcome: Verizon iPhone procrastinators arrive after tense holdout

Holdouts. Waiters. Procrastinators. Stubborn folk. Validated, finally. Verizon customers who’ve insisted on waiting for the Verizon iPhone have seen their ups and downs over the past four years. They’ve seen four different iPhone generations come and go while they’ve been stuck on a flip-phone or some Verizon smartphone they didn’t really want. They’ve seen the App Store explode even as they realized that when it comes to making the iPhone work with Verizon, there’s been no app for that. They’ve ignored the fact that most iPhone users don’t have issues with AT&T of any significance. But mostly they’ve gone through a cycle of saying to themselves, “Alright, no Verizon iPhone was announced this time. I must have an iPhone, but I don’t want to change carriers, so I’ll give it one more year.” And after three years of getting the short end of that stick, even as many of them were adding the corollary “…and this time I mean it,” this time they’re instead getting the payoff they’ve been waiting for. So here’s the question: was it worth it?

I’m not asking you, dear Verizon customer who’s now getting ready to camp out in front of an Apple Store as soon as the official on-sale date is made public (looks from here to be the first Friday of February, but we’ll see). And I’m not asking you, because I’ve heard what you have to say: AT&T is so bad that iPhone users can’t even reliably make phone calls. That AT&T has more dead spots than an episode of Saturday Night Live. That iPhone users also have to carry a Verizon flip-phone in their other pocket just to make phone calls. Yes, we’ve heard all this. Even as iPhone users have spent four years doing just fine with their iPhone on AT&T, we’ve had to listen to Verizon holdouts quiz us on just how horrifying the AT&T iPhone experience is, as if they were trying to find a way to reinterpret what we said into something negative even if it wasn’t. When Verizon users start in with their absurd fantasy-based questions about the AT&T iPhone experience, iPhone users often don’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

But we can’t really blame you, dear Verizon customer, because we know that you’re not just completely making it up. Like all carriers, AT&T works better in some places than others. Objective studies show Verizon’s network to be marginally better than that of AT&T, although both fall decidedly into the “mediocre” category. But then you’ve got fraudsters like Consumer Reports claiming that AT&T has the worst network in the history of the world. Then again, what do you want? Those are the same jackwagons who falsely claimed the iPhone 4 antenna issue was real, and revoked their iPhone 4 recommendation based on something they knew didn’t exist. Most iPhone users with Apple would sue those worthless pieces of crap at CR out of existence, if only so we wouldn’t have to hear about CR’s fraudulent claims from Verizon holdouts who become desperate to self-rationalize their decision to hold out every time they come into contact with an iPhone user. But I digress.

Here’s one thing for certain: regardless of whether you’re not validated for waiting all this time for a Verizon iPhone or not, dear Verizon customer, we welcome you to the iPhone platform with open arms. Now shut the &#($ up about how your Verizon iPhone is supposedly so superior to our AT&T iPhone. We’re tired of hearing about it already. Here’s more on the Verizon iPhone.