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If you had wifi at home/work/school, you could send and receive without incurring any data usage at all.

True, but at least in the case of iMessage, that would also mean not being able to text all while not within Wi-Fi coverage (since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage).

No; the iPhone launched with data plans. It just wasn't unlimited, nor were the texts. Sending an iMessage cost a lot less than ten cents of data; you could send/receive a lot more of them within your plan without overages.

(IIRC, my plan with Cingular didn't have any texts built-in, so they were 10¢ a pop, in each direction. I could send many thousands within the data plan's couple of gigabytes.)

> since Apple absolutely refuses to let people actually send an SMS to a number it considers to be participating in iMessage

Are you sure? I remember iMessage falling back to SMS if for some reason it can’t get through on iMessage.

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