Hacker News Reader

Comment by sir_eliah | Hacker News Reader

Is there a point in changing a phone so often if it's not broken?

I know it's not really an argument, but I tend to change my devices also every 2-3 years, just so I can pass the "old" one to my less technical family.

Att offered such good trade in rates for my phone that it’s been effectively free to upgrade to the last two generations.

it's not free because it's priced into the phone plan (phone plan price is jacked up), unless you got grandfathered in w/ a good rate.

Plus externalities. Producing things is never "free", even if the manufacturer were a charity and, you're right, they're not

Or even Google itself. I got a 150€ trade in rebate for an iPhone 8 with a cracked screen.

Whaaa? It gives me £65 even on an iPhone 12 in good condition. £50 for an 8 Plus. Same amount for 11 Pro or 10a

£50 for the 8 Plus isn't too bad though

(€150 = £127)

Well, back then when the Pixel 7a had just come out. So comparable to an iPhone 11 now

Oh I thought you meant recently. My bad

I hear people say things like this about phones, laptops and cars, but anecdotally I have never once seen any sort of trade-in offer, and only rarely and arguably on any kind of lease or lease-to-buy arrangement, where I would consider that even remotely true.

T-Mobile recently had a trade-in promotion where you could trade in any phone and get a pixel 10 for "free". The free is in quotes because what actually happens is you get signed up for device financing which spreads the cost of the phone over 2 years, and then they give your account a credit each month for the same amount charged by the device financing. So they'll end up charging you $33 per month and crediting you $33 per month, resulting in the phone actually being free. The catch is it locks you into 2 years on T-Mobile because if you cancel the account or pay off the phone early, you forfeit all the remaining credits.

Since it was free and I had no plans on leaving T-Mobile in the following 2 years, I went ahead and did the trade-in with an old Pixel 3a. What I didn't realize is since the phone is on a payment plan, the phone is not only carrier-locked (which would be fine) but also bootloader-locked until the end of those 2 years, so I cannot install GrapheneOS on it until ~2028. My free pixel 10 is sitting in its box gathering dust until 2028.

Here is a reddit thread discussing the trade-in promo as proof that it existed: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1r0by30/pixel_10_f...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com