AT&T stores will start moving to iPad-based Point of Sales by early next year
Over the past couple of years, Apple has been taking steps to overhaul its retail operations and customer experience with the iPad. From iPads for employees equipped with RetailMe and Concierge software …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the payoff of a two-year arc in which Apple turned the iPad from a product into retail infrastructure. The company put iPads into its own stores back in March 2010, then formalized the move in December 2010 when it opened a point-of-sale business around the hardware and software it built internally. By 2011 the model was spreading — Mobilized reported Best Buy weighing giving iPads to all its sales associates.
The AT&T deployment is the first confirmed carrier-scale adoption of that system outside Apple's own footprint, and the story traveled unusually far for a retail-hardware item — picked up same-day by Computerworld, CNET, Phone Arena and five other outlets. It matters because AT&T is one of Apple's largest distribution partners, meaning Apple's retail stack is now embedded in a rival sales channel.
First-order effects
- AT&T's store associates shift from legacy register-based checkout to iPad-based point of sale by early next year, changing how activations and upgrades are run across its retail fleet.
- Apple converts an internal retail tool into external revenue, with AT&T becoming a marquee reference customer for the POS system it opened up as a business line in December 2010.
Second-order effects
- Other carriers and big-box retailers — Best Buy among them, given its 2011 deliberations over arming associates with iPads — face pressure to match the checkout experience or look dated against AT&T's stores.
- Traditional enterprise point-of-sale vendors lose ground at exactly the moment their largest retail customers are re-evaluating hardware, since consumer tablets undercut purpose-built terminals on cost and update cadence.
Third-order effects
- If carrier-scale deployments hold, retail checkout consolidates around consumer tablet platforms, shifting value in the POS market from terminal manufacturers toward whoever controls the tablet OS and its software layer.
- Apple's retail-technology business becomes a channel strategy in itself: the more partner stores run on Apple hardware, the deeper Apple's presence sits inside competitors' customer touchpoints.
The trend: Consumer tablets are displacing dedicated point-of-sale terminals in high-volume retail, with Apple moving first inside its own stores and now exporting the system to partners like AT&T.