OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe

I got badly burned by the Pixel 5a, but especially with Google's support. My wife and I both had 5a, and both died spectacularly right around the end of warranty period. Mine ultimately got replaced under warranty and that replacement died the same way when I was on vacation less than a year later... which they refused to repair under warranty.

They put up such a shit show and had us run through so many hoops with my wife's phone that it ended up being out of warranty by the time they agreed it was broken and needed repaired. The support experience was so painful I reluctantly let them get away with their bullshit, bought a new phone (oneplus) for my wife, and swore not to buy another Pixel phone despite having a strong preference for them and the pure Android experience.

I worked for OnePlus a few years ago, managing its Amazon account.

The culture leaned heavily toward 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. I was there during a particularly tumultuous period, and by that point a lot of the staffing had already been hollowed out.

That said, the OnePlus 11, 12, 13, and 15 are great phones. The 13 and 15 in particular have insane battery life. I have never managed to drain either one to zero in a single day.

As far as I know, OnePlus and Motorola are also the only major companies selling phones with silicon-carbon batteries in the United States. It is ridiculous that Samsung and Apple still have not adopted them.

One of my biggest frustrations at OnePlus was how much of the internal tooling remained in Chinese or used poor English translations. Most of the management was also based in China and often did not seem to understand the US market very well.

Probably the most ridiculous example was an internal invoice or payment-submission portal. It was awful to use, but the terminology was even stranger. A submission apparently needed to be “signed” and then “sealed.”

I never asked anyone what the original Chinese term was, but I assumed it referred to the use of a Chinese name chop or company seal. Name chops are stone stamps bearing a person’s or company’s name that are pressed into ink and applied to documents as a form of authorization.

It was a small thing, but it captured the broader problem pretty well: internal processes designed around Chinese business practices were translated literally and then handed to US employees with very little localization.

They should make a phone with completely open bootloader. As censorship and surveillance is going to be implemented across the West, that could be a great differentiator from the brands supporting loss of liberty.

> A submission apparently needed to be “signed” and then “sealed.”

... and delivered?

> Then they flushed nearly all of it down the toilet. The day they stopped posting factory images was the day I saw the writing on the wall.

For me, it was when the killed the headphone jack with the OnePlus 6T. Around the time OP6 was released, the then CEO Carl Pei posted a poll around the headphone jack - a overwhelming majority of users said they used/wanted the jack - something like 80%+). Then they go ahead and release the 6T (and subsequent models) with no jack. At this point most of the OG fans (including myself) felt incredibly betrayed and vowed to never buy another OnePlus again. And soon, Carl Pei himself left the company and it's been downhill ever since.

The OP6 was their last good phone which actually lived up to their "flagship killer" premise without compromising on features.