Among the many angry customers whom Jeremy Derr encountered during his time as an Apple Genius, the one he remembers best is the professional photographer with the bad FireWire port.

For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

This is in line with what I’ve been hearing from old friends still at the Mothership. I especially liked the anecdote later in the article about AT&T trying to enforce a dress code on Steve. Can you imagine?

More to the point, my same sources tell me that during early discussions in the year leading up to the release of the original iPhone, Verizon was even worse in their treatment of Apple in general and Steve in particular.

From the Before Times:

The shape of today’s Genius Bar has more to do with the iPod than anything else. Whereas a Mac Genius in 2002 spent most of his time, logically, working with Macintoshes, the Mac Genius of 2006 spends far more time staring blankly at iPods. The 2002 Model Genius spent quality time with two, maybe three customers per hour. In 2006, he crams six or eight iPods into an hour and commonly spends an entire day handling only shiny white music players while a co-worker helps the Macintosh customers. In 2002, the Genius helped mostly level-headed, professional adults. Later, he helps mostly tantrum-throwing children and teenagers.

Ultimately, fixing the situation will be much more complicated than I posited, not just because the iPod has only grown since I wrote this in 2006 but also because the iPhone and iPad have since dwarfed even the iPod. Returning the Genius Bar to focus solely on Macs simply cannot happen at this point.

I’m not sure that forcing the existing staff to do more at once and extending their hours is quite the correct choice, though.

Most irritatingly, it grounds when it’s in my pocket, making the headset almost useless. Interestingly, the effect is worst when the headset is in stereo mode; when taking calls (which are mono), the sound merely crackles occasionally, whereas when listening to music the sound cuts out entirely.

Google disclosed Friday that its Street View cars had mistakenly collected data about the Web sites users were visiting on open wireless Internet networks.

That’s an awfully specific thing to “mistakenly” do.

AT&T Free Msg: AT&T appreciates your Mark the Spot feedback from Leander TX on 5/30/2010. We are pleased to inform you that we have a new cell site planned near your submission in the next 60-90 days. If you have any further comments or feedback, you may reply to this msg for free. Thank you, AT&T.

I couldn’t help but write back asking what the weather will be like when I’m in Leander a week from Monday. Great to know that they’re actually using Mark the Spot feedback to place new towers, though.

It sounds like a script for a bad baseball movie, but it actually happened to Padres pitcher Tim Stauffer yesterday morning. He was able to take a taxi to a hospital in San Diego, where the staff confirmed his diagnosis and immediately scheduled him for surgery.