AT&T now getting more growth from mobile than Apple

The handheld vision Steve Jobs sold to AT&T in 2007 has come to pass. The problem for Apple investors is that the booming market the company created with the iPhone in 2007 -- and then boosted with the iPad three years later -- is now producing more growth for AT&T than it is for Apple itself.

AT&T reported its strongest growth in long-term wireless subscribers in five years, "with smartphones and tablets leading the way," as AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said. Just as important, a surging number of AT&T customers are switching to so-called usage-based pricing -- paying based on how much wireless data they download from the Web -- rather than paying for the devices up front with the help of subsidies.

While the transition is putting a short-term hit on AT&T's balance sheet (as it has to write down the full price of such device sales immediately), the popularity of those plans also helped generate the company's strongest cash flow from operations in seven years.

"The move away from device subsidies accelerated in Q1," Stephens said, as the number of new and existing customers choosing so-called mobile share data plans tripled from a year earlier