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Comment by LiamPowell | Hacker News Reader

This is correct, people generally don't get to own a device provided by their employer. Not allowing the bootloader to be unlocked on company-owned devices seems like a very desirable feature.

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Not allowing a bootloader to be unlocked on a company-owned device does sound like a desirable feature, but only for company-owned devices. Applying that setup to all phones assumes that the default phone is a company-owned device and is subject to external control.

A different SKU for enterprise managed devices would cripple IT departments that don't pay the big bucks to e.g. verizon to manage their device provisioning & MDM enrollment.

Wut? I don’t follow? Anyway, once you are big enough to care about preventing bootloader unlocking on your company devices you are big enough to pay for that privilege.

You'd need two different SKUs for each different color and size to enable this in a more user-friendly way, where devices either enterprise locked or carrier locked get the one with a locked-by-default bootloader, and ones bought directly by the consumer have an unlocked bootloader. Realistically the latter group is so small it doesn't make sense to complicate the production and logistics process by having this separation. Instead, we get the current situation where the bootloader can be unlocked after initial setup check.

The latter group is plenty big enough at the point of sale (e.g. every single store).

At least in the US, most phones purchased in stores are carrier locked. I cannot purchase an unlocked pixel at most, if not all, nearby retailers.

It would be much nicer if it defaulted to allowing unlocking through. You can boot up a DEP enrolled Mac and use it even if your internet connection doesn't work, including disabling SIP and the bootloader. Though your MDM attestation may fail if you then enroll it. That need to explain yourself to the IT department should be enough incentive to an employee to not unlock your work device bootloader.

They already do these special locked SKUs for American carriers.

Has it occurred to you that the feature you're defending allows Google to lock customers into their provisioning/MDM? That this is worse than Verizon controlling provisioning/MDM, because at least Verizon is subject to market competition (ie you can buy the device from other parties), whereas Google doing it means you have no choice whatsoever?

You're also grossly exaggerating things. We're not talking about a change that would prohibit management, just one that would not allow them to do zero-touch enrollment into their management systems.

Customers as in people who buy Pixel phones? Why would Google try to lock those people into MDM?

If this is like DEP on macOS, it is more like a first use redirect until enrollment than a fully-blown MDM.

It assumes that company owned and managed phones are more common than people who want to unlock the bootloader. I know this isn't ideal, but that's the correct assumption to make.

That’s a stupid false dichotomy caused by a poor onboarding workflow. “Well we either make it easier for businesses or deny the right to literally every customer to own their device. It’s okay because most people won’t notice.”

You'll notice that the market is not lining up to buy the PinePhone in response to this state of affairs, so I would say that the decision has been working out well for Google.

It is very much the case that most people don't care about this definition of freedom.

Very few people exercise their fifth amendment right. That doesn’t mean people are tacitly agreeing to it being taken away.

I didn’t say it wasn’t popular. I’m saying people don’t realize how badly they are exposed because the hammer hasn’t dropped.

The market for PinePhone is weak because it’s “only for the pesky open source people”. It will stay that way a long time and we better hope they survive long enough for Google to keep screwing people into a big enough market.

It assumes that company owned and managed phones are more common that people who are unwilling to connect to the internet to unlock their bootloader. Which is definitely true. Probably by several orders of magnitude. Who cares? You get to unlock your bootloader.

I don't know about managed, but for high-end I think it's been true for many years that the bulk of them are bought by companies.

But the provisioning check is forced on everyone.

I don't think it's reasonable to enforce a provisioning process on every single person just because a small number of the devices go to enterprise-sized companies that want "zero touch" and Google (and their distributors) don't want the expense of stocking two SKUs, one set to require provisioning, and another not.

I shouldn't have to prove ownership of my device to said device straight out of the box.

A company should not have the ability to render millions of devices useless because they purposefully or accidentally shut off a provisioning service

All this bullshit is so that Google and their enterprise customers save a few dollars.

> A company should not have the ability to render millions of devices useless because they purposefully or accidentally shut off a provisioning service

Isn't this considering a hypothetical scenario where somebody buys one of these phones, tosses it in a drawer for years, and only later comes back to discover the provisioning server is gone?

If you buy one of these phones it says it can be unlocked and you can't unlock it, Google is obligated to take it back for a refund or to eat a lawsuit from aggrieved customers for false advertising.

So how much of a premium would you pay for the alternate sku?

Even if you buy it yourself you don't get to own it before having google bless your device, which you can only hope they will.

Well, "hope" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Google is still very much bound by the law regarding advertising and declaration of utility of sold product. The law gives them broad leeway as to the implementation, but if they decided tomorrow "hey you know how you can unlock your devices that we advertised as unlocked on our store? We changed our minds, the devices sold can no longer be unlocked," that would be grounds at the very least for return with refund, and a lawsuit if Google didn't honor that.

except that their employer[0] doesn't own it either

[0] except for the employer being google in this case

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