101–110 of 128 posts
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Is there no BW/throttling/data cap on tethering/hotspot also for T-Mobile?
No, on "Magenta Max" you get 40GB of unthrottled tethering, and then after that it's throttled to 256k or something nearly useless like that.
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Your premise that you don’t save money by buying your phone through the carrier is incorrect. AT&T has had generous trade-in options to upgrade an existing iPhone to a new one since forever. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12 that was bought for list price, but AT&T offered somewhere around $350 for an old iPhone 7Plus that was half broken. There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so…
> There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market AT&T is not a charity, so how do they make that possible? > It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract > they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill. There you go. That's how you're paying for it. You're not saving money, stop deluding you…
All wireless carriers offer huge incentives to come to their network. Because there’s a lot of friction for people to change.
Offering generous trade-in programs is just part of the same tactics. They’ll make just a tiny bit less profit, but it’s way better than seeing a customer go to somebody else. The cost of a cell phone network is dominated by capital investments.
I can do math. It looks like you can’t? Because it’s really not hard to take the regular price of a phone vs what you get after incentives and compare which one is cheapest. And then do the same with plans and compare those with prepaid.
I see prepaid plans for $40+taxes and fees for prepaid and they don’t offer what I want, for which I pay $55 after all taxes and fees.
So for around $10 or $240 more over 2 years minus $350 in trade-in, I get the plan features that I want and the phone that I want. IOW: I get a better deal all around than what I’d get with prepaid. Financially and feature-wise.
Would you please care to explain me how I’m the dumb one here, because I clearly don’t get it.
As for that tacked on charge: the guy in the store obviously added it without my permission to pad his commission. I hate it too. It took me 5min on the phone to get it reversed. I already wrote that it was orthogonal to the concept of getting a better deal vs buying straight from Apple, but somehow you didn’t get that.
I don't understand what he means by this?
"Same," he replied. "Most of my friends and family have iPhones. If you have just one Android person on a group text, it throws everything." I don't understand what he means by this?
Why these people don't use OTT apps like WhatsApp I'll never know.
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> There’s absolutely no way I would have been able to resell that old phone for so much in the open market AT&T is not a charity, so how do they make that possible? > It’s true that the trade-in locks me into a 2 year contract > they signed me up for a warranty plan behind my back that I had to cancel after seeing my first bill. There you go. That's how you're paying for it. You're not saving money, stop deluding you…
Dude, this is not complicated. All wireless carriers offer huge incentives to come to their network. Because there’s a lot of friction for people to change. Offering generous trade-in programs is just part of the same tactics. They’ll make just a tiny bit less profit, but it’s way better than seeing a customer go to somebody else. The cost of a cell phone network is dominated by capital investments. I can do math. It…
No, it really isn't. A giant for-profit corporation is using every trick in the book, every little bit of marketing knowledge and know-how, to psychologically reassure you and lull you into thinking you're getting a "good deal". You're not.
> I already wrote that it was orthogonal to the concept of getting a better deal
It's not orthogonal, because that is how they make money off of you, which is why they're offering incentives to get you onto their network. Once you're on a plan, the bullshit starts, and you'll have to be on your guard so that your plan doesn't change from under your feet.
You might save some money in the absolute sense, but you're paying for it with vigilance and hassle and annoyance. And if you slip up once, they got their money back. A large part of their business model is simply to saddle their subscribers with high-margin useless crap, hoping enough of them won't notice.
As an example, if you compare 5G coverage for AT&T's prepaid vs regular plans, you'll see that 5G is available on cheaper regular plans than the prepaid ones. Why is that? Are they a charity? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts they're offering it to their loyal customers?
No, they're doing it, because they know they'll make more money off of you, on your $55 regular plan, than they'll do off of someone on a $55 total prepaid plan.
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When cell phones came to Sweden in the 90's, all the carriers did the exact same thing, offering phones and plans as bundles. But after a couple of years of fierce competition, margins were so thin that it was 100% obvious that any plan that came "with" a phone was essentially just their regular phone plans + a payment plan for the phone. You saved absolutely no money by paying for your phone through a carrier, and f…
The plans let people who can't afford a $2,000 phone get one.
(Actually, people shouldn't buy things on credit in the first place, but this whole sub-discussion is about financially illiterate people, so...)
Somewhat related: this idea of adding a "digital waiting line" on top of a normal one is horrible, the author mentions this in ATT. Disneyland has done this with food, and it's really really irritating. Here is an example of what it is like to get Blue Milk at Star Wars Land in Disneyland: 1) order it in the app and pay for it. 2) it tells you when to go there 3) wait for your phone to turn green, with a group of oth…
What do you do if you don't have a smartphone?
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The last good business move I think ATT made was getting exclusive access to iPhones in 2007 for five years or whatever it was. And that is why I’ve been paying them around ~$40 per line per month since. Actually, it was also due to them being the only big network with SIM cards I could pop out and use another country’s SIM. Verizon took forever to get SIM cards.
> Verizon took forever to get SIM cards. CDMA phones never needed SIM until LTE came along. I once had a Verizon "global" featurephone that supported both CDMA and 2G GSM. It had a Verizon SIM for the GSM side but wasn't otherwise needed for non-roaming connectivity over CDMA.
AT&T's (corporate) store service is absolutely terrible. I have money, a working phone (or the SIM from a broken phone), and want to upgrade. Why can't I hand you the money and get a new phone without 20 minutes of tapping around on an iPad? And god forbid you have a business account, then it'll take thirty or forty minutes because they have to look through your account to see if there's anything to fix, and then som…
Better than me, I had extensive up-sell attempts.
The only hiccup I've found is international calls on roaming are insanely expensive. I had a $100 phone call to South America roaming when it would have cost ~$10 in network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless...