When I bought my current phone they sent me one that was locked. I called at&t to try and get it resolved and they told me to pound sand because I’m not a customer. Huge ordeal that could have been solved in 2 minutes.
This literally happened to me recently. Was going to Germany for 2 weeks and wanted to use a cheap eSIM for data only. I asked them if they could unlock my phone so I could do this, and they said no since it’s not paid off. I still have a new months left to pay it off, and didn’t wanna drop $250 to do that so I just had to pay the international data plan. $12(maybe $10? Can’t remember) a day, 10 day maximum charge per cycle so I’ll pay $120 for mine and $60 for my partners. Instead of the $11 30gb data plan I wanted. I’m never buying a phone from a carrier again, I will always just buy it outright from now on. It was a stupid situation.
Also the data roaming sucked, each time we moved from one provider network to another we had to restart our phones as the data didn’t wanna work…
Capitalist companies can be awfully communist when it comes to our cellphone.
Like when you buy the thing sooner? Cuz we would remove all the bloatware they add. They used to do that to computers and we just stopped buying those shit things and building our own.
Shit man. I used to work at a Circuit City at the height of bloated shitty Celeron PCs.
We would be forced to sell a “system optimization” on each PC we sold. It was just a script that uninstalled a few of the bloatware items and tweaked the animation speed to make the customer think we did something incredible.
I fucking hated that job!
Just make carrier locking illegal and have customers pay the actual price, now it’s just hidden costs to the consumer.
It isn’t been a hidden cost for a while. Phone companies sell the phones at full price, but consumers want the 2 year 0% APR financing.
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.
You’re going off of phone contracts that haven’t been around for a decade. The cost of the phone up front, and has been for a long time.
They lock it so you’ll pay for the phone. That’s the only reason.
Should requiring people to pay for things be illegal?
Frankly you’re being ignorant, and expect to somehow get a thousand dollar device for free. That’s not how the world works.
