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Comment by bandrami | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in a lot of countries over the past couple of decades, I can say this is absolutely something Americans do completely wrong. Just buy your phone at full price. The "free" phones cost significantly more than a full price phone.

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It was also much easier to import cheap unlocked phones from abroad when the whole world used at most 4 frequency bands. Now there's several dozen and I don't think even the most expensive flagship phones support all of them.

To paraphrase a common phrase I've seen around here: The "G" in "LTE" stands for "global".

There are tools to check the compatibility of the phone with the carrier, some sellers like Tradingshenzen integrate that into their shops. A quick check shows that indeed the US carriers have many incompatible bands with the phones. On the other hand, there is only one or two bands that you have to check when importing to Europe.

In Norway several of the mobile phone telecom operators sell phones on down payment plans that cost nothing extra compared to buying it cash up front.

It has been like this for several years and it’s great!

You can pay a pretty low monthly down payment over a period of 36 month.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, I don’t even have to enter into any binding contract for any phone plan to buy the phone this way. And even if I did have to do that the most they are allowed to bind me to is 12 months, by law.

Consumer protection laws in my country are fabulous :)

Yes but you will generally pay more for your monthly plan in those cases vs. buying an unlocked phone at full price and a dirt-cheap SIM like Lebara.

In my country you do not. No idea how they do it, but the plan and buying the phone separate (iPhone 16 pro Max) phone costs about 300 more than the phone and plan combined.

That implies you are paying too much for phones then, since the mobile providers can apparently get them significantly cheaper. They may also be selling your data and pre-installing apps, but every country does that.

I think it's a way for Phone OEMs to push their phones into the market as a marketing measure/to gain market shares without destroying their retail price because it never happens to very popular phones like the iPhone

EU. They are not selling my data nor pre installing apps..

You can still do that as well

A new thing in India is a zero-cost EMI scheme where some intermediary company refunds the cost of the interest over a short period: typically 6 months.

I haven't tried it yet, but a dealer told only to use such a scheme if I didn't plan to use the credit card for anything else during that period.

I can't figure out how they're making money on this scheme.

That’s what I thought and did this for years. However, the major carriers do offer promotions and incentives that make the phones cheaper, sometimes significantly. e.g. of recent deal from major US carriers: iPhone 16 deal for $16/month for 36 months ($576 total) versus Apple store $699.

Right, but what does the plan cost? If it’s more expensive than other providers and you are locked in for 36 months, that’s where they make their money.

Right but they're locking you into a contract plan that's much more expensive than you would get with BYOD. They still get the money.

Another label I fell for in the US was "lite" cooking oil. The fine print said "light in colour."

The "free" is just advertising and for people habituated to credit, it's a no-brainer. Pun intended.

What did you expect it to be lite in?

Calories. Yeah, I was naive back in the 90s.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they rip people off on cheaper phones, but for higher end phones the “free” phones are typically exactly the normal price of the phone split over 24 payments. Every time I buy a new phone I compare buying it directly versus via a carrier and it always comes down to which option currently has a promotion or sale I can take advantage of.

You do realise that they make the money from locking you into their service? In other countries people pay a lot less than the US.

I pay the equivalent of usd 20 for 5 mobile plans, a fibre connection and a landline per month with no throttling on any connection. AFAIK no operator here offers locked phones at all any more.

> The "free" phones cost significantly more than a full price phone

I buy phones at full price, but in general the free/subsidized versions don't cost more. You just pay over time. For many people, it would even be worth it to pay somewhat more if they don't have the money to pay up front.

One downside though is that you're more likely to upgrade to features you don't need because "it's only an extra $5/6/10 per month". Gotta always consider the total cost.

Is this an option that's available all the time? Back when the Nexus 5 was still new, I tried doing exactly this and took one I just bought to my local Verizon outlet to have it activated on their network. The tech there told me that while the phone DID have the hardware needed to be compatible on Verizon's network, he was "not allowed" to activate it for me unless I bought it directly through them. I've since switched to T-Mobile and never looked back.

Verizon around the Nexus 5 still had a lot of CDMA and you needed to have a phone activated.

Now that networks are pretty much LTE and 5G only, if your phone takes a SIM, take the SIM out of the old phone and put it in the new phone. Some carriers still play games with allowlists for VoLTE though.

But you might have better luck (and better pricing) with a MVNO or the prepaid side of your preferred carrier.

Allowlists for VoLTE are a perfectly reasonable (if extremely unfortunate) safety measure.

Because of the special handling that emergency calls must get in cellular networks, many older phones will use circuit-switched fallback (AKA 3g or 2G) for those calls, even if they are otherwise VoLTE capable.

This was pretty much fine back in the day, as 2g and 3g networks were just as (if not more) widespread as VoLTE, but those networks are now being shut down. If you have one of these phones and an LTE-only carrier allows it onto their network, you will be able to make any normal call, but emergency calls will not work.

To add insult to injury, there's no way for the carrier to tell whether any specific phone does emergency calls over VoLTE or not, especially if they don't have a contract with that vendor. Some phones may only do it in certain configurations, E.G. when branded for that specific carrier and configured with their preferred modem settings.

The car salesman will also try to tell you he's not allowed to let you take the vehicle off the lot without rustproofing.

Okay, what I really meant to ask was whether Verizon in particular is still incredibly dishonest about the process of bringing your own device as I had personally experienced. Obviously, the real solution is just to take your business elsewhere.

No, then again I wouldn’t recommend it now since there’s tons of mvno’s to go to that you can order online without dealing with less scrupulous store employees. Best advice I can give if you still want to do verizon/tmo/att direct is AVOID authorized retailers, only use the corporate stores.

it's a lot easier to pay smaller amounts over time than it is to pay a large lump sum, even if it is technically less after x number of years. Delayed gratification etc, but also sometimes folks need a phone and can't put off the purchase until they save up the upfront price. T

You can get usable $150 phones to fulfill a need. Nobody needs a $1000 phone they can't afford.

People often give bs reasons like

- oh. I like night time camera from 1K pixel or iPhone

You can buy a no-contract Android phone for like $80

If you take a look at marketshare, Americans are animals that spend well beyond their means in bulk. Apple products or Samsung products dominate the smartphone market and it's the expensive ones.

To be fair I know a nontrivial number of people who bought their iPhones used. I’m sure that happens in the android market, but it doesn’t seem to be as common in the US. I think the fact that iPhones have offered acceptable support for much longer than android has helps a lot there.

And the cars! JFC every time I come back to the States I'm amazed/shocked/appalled at these suburban land tanks everywhere. Just buy a normal car!

but also sometimes folks need a phone and can't put off the purchase until they save up the upfront price.

Whatever happened to planning ahead? No wonder things are the way they are.

It's easy to forget this place is populated with upper-middleclass skilled professionals that probably haven't lived economically precariously in years, if ever.

For some folks out there, planning ahead is "will I have enough money for groceries next paycheck?". There are cheap phones, and I agree that folks are careless. But there is also a concerted effort to encourage this kind of behavior because the economy is built on this kind of dumb consumer spending and debt.

Things being the way they are is exactly the reason Americans can't afford to pay for a cell phone upfront. There's no amount of "planning ahead" that will change that when people are living paycheck to paycheck and having to go into debt to afford basic things like groceries.

My monthly plan payment would not go down if I brought my own phone.

You sure about that? Look up Visible, Mint Mobile, Total Wireless, US Mobile, Tello... Same carrier networks, same quality of service. You can even pay a bit extra for prioritized data and other fancy features. You can get basic unlimited plans for $15-30 and premium plans in the $30-50 range vs $100+ at the big carriers. The only difference is that you aren't paying for your "free" phone.

Yeah, I got screwed by both Sprint and Verizon in turn back in the day, so for ages I've just done T Mobile's prepaid plan with an unlocked phone.

Works great, no particular coverage issues, never used enough data to hit any notable throttling.

In this case you’ve switched providers, though. Might be a good idea but doesn’t say anything about whether, e.g., ATT will lower your price if you bring your own phone.

I’ve read that these virtual networks also get lower prioritization so you can get low bandwidth when the higher tier users are active. Not sure how accurate that is.

Broadband Map tracks priority levels for the big three US carriers' plans and the MVNOs they support. I paid $225 promo pricing for one year of Visible+ Pro with unlimited priority Verizon data and all taxes and fees included ($18.75/mo), so I can pay full price for a flagship phone and end up ahead of any carrier phone deal.

https://broadbandmap.com/priority

That’s a useful resource. Thanks.

That’s the whole point of buying your phone unlocked: to allow competition between carriers. Growing up in Europe we had very cheap prepaid plans but you still paid more for out of network than in-network, so lots of budget conscious people had two or more prepaid sims and swapped between them. No monthly bill and you add money to whichever number is low. It helped that receiving calls or sms was free, so you could ring someone and have them call you back if you were a bit low on funds.

Man thinking back, I probably got away with less than 2 dollars a month back in 2006-2010 era.

And if you don’t use a lot of data, at least US Mobile has a by the gig plan. My family has three phones on it for a total $30 per month. Those months that we go over, it automatically charges $2 for each extra GB, with data pooled between the lines.

It is easy to switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile as well. This was helpful for me as all three of the networks normally have one bar or less at my house. T-mobile WiFi calling works more reliably than Verizon.

Your particular plan might not but there are BYOD plans that are significantly cheaper than anything you'll get on contract

There are plans available where that is the case. So the solution would be to switch plans or carriers to one that doesn't bundle the phone price in.

HN apparently can't fathom that people pay for Verizon because the service is good. I get Verizon free through work and sorry it's noticeably faster than Visible. The discount plans aren't actually the same but cheaper. If you were going to be a Verizon customer anyway then the free phone is actually free. You don't get a discount for BYOD and the service is the same price whether you take the phone or not.

I suspect that many Americans would struggle to afford to pay for a phone outright. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck and are already in record amounts of household debt.

This is often repeated but false - it’s not the vast majority, nor even a majority.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-half-...

It just depends on who you ask and what they think living paycheck to paycheck means.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/52-americans-live-paycheck-pa...

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/goldman-sachs-study-fin...

https://econofact.org/factbrief/is-there-a-consensus-that-a-...

No matter if it's "Nearly half" or 60%, things are clearly far from good for most Americans.

Americans are, adjusted for inflation, literally richer than Americans have ever been at any point in history right now, at every quintile in the income distribution. If that's "far from good" I'm not even sure what that phrase means.

If the point is just that the hedonic treadmill means Americans will continue to be less and less happy as we get more and more wealthy, well, that's the problem we need to fix.

How is that measured? All the anecdotal evidence I’ve ever seen suggests the number of hours you have to work at realistic (especially entry level) wages to afford rent, basic food, and transit to said job is currently higher than it’s ever been as far as I can tell in my lifetime. Rent alone has risen substantially higher than inflation, which seems like it should especially skew the numbers on the low end.

Rent has risen about the same as wages over the last 40 years. So a bit higher than inflation but not so much that it’s less affordable.

Health care and education are the two that have really outpaced inflation, the trade-off being that basically all durable and consumable goods have run way below inflation.

Inflation is the rate at which prices rise. If things are getting more expensive faster than inflation, you're just undercounting inflation.

Inflation is the rate that a whole basket of goods gets more expensive. At least that’s how CPI is calculated and it’s what I meant by it. Since that number is averaged across a bunch of goods and services, there will always be some that increase faster or slower than inflation as a whole.

Are those figures mean wages? Or median wages?

Because the difference between those is a vast gulf.

Median. BLS barely tracks mean wages at all because it's extremely hard to do.

Huh? My Pixel 9 was free (late 2024) with a 20€/month 2 year contract that includes unlimited calls, SMS, and 5 gigs of 5G data. 480€ when the cheapest full price was over 500 (and then wouldn’t include the data or calls). Certainly not an American thing, and certainly not "significantly more".

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