AT&T Opens iPhone Price War With Buy-One-Get-One-Free Offer

After vowing to avoid a repeat of the blistering iPhone price war of last year, AT&T will fire the first shot offering a free iPhone with the purchase of another, for customers who also subscribe to its DirecTV satellite service, according to Bloomberg.

The buy-one-get-one-free promotion just started and applies to the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, among other phones. AT&T hasn’t said whether the deal will be extended to Apple’s most expensive phone ever, the $999 iPhone X, aka 10, which marks a decade since the company entered the phone business.

Under pressure to find new customers in a market where every adult already has at least one phone, the wireless companies duked it out with cutthroat pricing on the iPhone last year. The giveaways took a toll on margins, costing about $200 per subscriber in the second half of 2016, according to Jefferies Group LLC.

“We had to over-promote“ to compete with plans from rivals such as T-Mobile, but that further improved customer loyalty, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said in an interview. T-Mobile, which was the first and most aggressive on price last year, said it was steering clear this time around. Instead, the company plans to offer a $300 trade-in credit for customers buying the iPhone X, as well as the new 8 and 8 Plus. The trade-in must be an iPhone 6 or newer. The other top carriers have been relatively restrained so far.