Carrier Fees and Surcharges Are Coming for LTE Apple Watch Owners ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

When the Apple Watch Series 3 first launched, carriers in the United States and other countries where the LTE version of the device is available offered three free months of service and waived activation fees.

That fee-free grace period is coming to an end, and customers are getting their first bills that include the $10 per month service charge.

If you have an Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE functionality, you’ve probably already learned that $10 is not all it’s going to cost per month. On carriers like AT&T and Verizon, there are additional service charges and fees, which means it’s not $10 per month for an Apple Watch, it’s more like $12-$14.

I still think it’s egregious that carriers are charging anything more than an administrative fee — at most — to use an LTE Apple Watch on their network. You don’t get any additional data allotment by adding an Apple Watch to your plan; if anything, the data a Watch will use will be dramatically less than that used by a smartphone. Yet another subscription is the kind of thing that makes me wary of an LTE Apple Watch — not necessarily because of the price, but because of the ethics. I bet most consumers can tell that this is nothing more than a money grab by carriers.