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I can't think of any other product I can buy today that is set up this way. Yet somehow we accept buying a phone from a carrier and having it difficult or impossible to use elsewhere.

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Well, there aren't a lot of examples of products that you get a big discount on in exchange for signing up for a non-cancelable (or only with an early termination fee) service contract which used to be pretty much the standard model for cell phones. So you still the remnants of that practice even though a lot of people don't get carrier subsidies these days.

It’s not really a discount because the plan is typically more expensive than a BYOD plan. In a sense, you’re amortizing the cost of the phone over the terms of the plan.

If you look for examples of that, you’ll find it looks like nearly every loan. So cars, and houses function pretty similarly.

If you buy an AMD server processor, some vendors will lock it to their brand of motherboards on first boot.

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