Edible Apple

Long before the iPhone entrenched itself as a revolutionary product that would go on to change the way we view and use smartphones, Apple approached Verizon and asked them if they were interested in carrying the device.

Clearly, those talks didn’t go all that swimmingly as Apple would eventually strike a deal with AT&T instead. In the end, negotiations between Verizon and Apple reportedly broke down as a result of Verizon’s unwillingness to cave to Apple demands, such as not having the iPhone plastered with the Verizon logo. In short, Apple wanted to control the entire iPhone experience, right down to how it looked, and Verizon – who is just as stubborn as Apple – refused to budget, no matter how alluring or promising the iPhone appeared to be.

Flash forward to 2010 and the iPhone is a bona fide hit, with the fourth-gen model poised to hit stores later this summer. The only glitch is that the iPhone is still an AT&T exclusive, and while AT&T has done much to improve their network over the past few years, there’s no denying that the most reliable cellular network in the US still belongs to Verizon.

Rumors of the iPhone coming to Verizon have popped up quite consistently over the past few years, though all of them have turned out to be false flags. Interestingly, though, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg recently proclaimed before the Council on Foreign Relations that Verizon approached Apple and told them that they were interested in carrying the iPhone. During his remarks, Seidenberg even cited a recent Wall Street Journal article which noted that Apple was hard at work developing a CDMA capable iPhone that would run on Verizon.

Seidenberg did not confirm or deny the report, and it wasn’t entirely clear when Verizon had approached Apple about carriyng the iPhone in the first place. Still, with AT&T’s exclusive contract to sell the iPhone in the US rumored to end in June of this year, a CDMA equipped iPhone isn’t all that far fetched, despite Apple COO Tim Cook’s assertion that CDMA is a dying technology.

At this point, the iPhone hitting Verizon is more a matter of ‘when’ than ‘if’.

via Yahoo