Comment by neelc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neelc | Hacker News Reader

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In the US, many refurbished Pixel phones are Verizon variants which disallow OEM unlocking.

When was in college and had Sprint this was a nightmare since then I wanted root for unlimited hotspot (Sprint made it easy that way), but most refurbished Pixels were Verizon variants.

And I couldn't just use OnePlus because they were only designed GSM networks or later Verizon CDMA-less. Then, new Pixels were unaffordable for me, but parents insisted on using Sprint.

I ended up getting a Pixel 3 off Mercari (which I still own) just to keep root.

Now, I can afford a Pixel 10 Pro new (which I am right now), alongside spare Pixel 9 and OnePlus 13R units. But even then (a) my income is lower than when I worked at Microsoft and (b) The OnePlus was from a trade-in deal.

Oh man, sorry to hear that! On the other side of the pond, carrier-specific/locked phones haven't been a thing for ages. Haven't seen a carrier-specific phone since 2013 or 2014.

Is it not possible to buy a phone in the US without any cellular providers involved? I thought that kind of lock-in was a thing of the past.

It is possible, but many people still buy them from their provider with financing or subsidies. That means people shopping for used Pixels who want to unlock the bootloader need to avoid the special Verizon variant which forbids unlocking the bootloader.

This is separate from SIM locking, which forbids use with another carrier. US carriers still do that, but are required to remove the lock after a while if the customer doesn't owe them money.

It's not clear why Verizon insists on permanently locked bootloaders or why Google agrees to it for Verizon when they don't do it on Pixels sold anywhere else.

Yep. I lost a restocking fee when I bought a used "unlocked" Pixel. Turned out it was not SIM locked, but it was impossible to unlock the bootloader. It was pretty easy to find a bootloader-unlockable Pixel once I knew what to look out for, but the first time I had no idea this was something you had to look out for.

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