If consumers bought the phones from a third party, there’d be absolutely no reason to lock the phone to a carrier. But when carriers also provide the financing, there’s an incentive to keep them on the service until the bill is paid. Screw that.
If I could drop $1000+ for the device all at once, I already would be getting them carrier unbranded.
Then don’t buy a $1k device, and instead buy something you can afford?
Otherwise, there are tons of buy now, pay later services, so you could just use any of those.
Not go into debt to upgrade something that actually in most cases doesn’t need upgrading. What a amazing thought.
There are tons of buy now, pay later services, and they make money through revenue sharing w/ the retailer, as well as when people fail to pay back the loan on time.
But ideally, this would just put downward pressure on phone prices as people look to buy phones w/ cash instead of going into debt.
