Smartphones Are a Toxic Dumpster Fire
Nota beni: I am totally blind and have congestive heart failure with regular episodes of ventricular tachycardia. Keep all of that in mind as you read this.
Back in June of 2018, I bought a Motorola G6, an Android phone, through Amazon. Yeah they’re a terrible company, but that’s a topic for another rant. We didn’t do our research. This device was sold as a “Prime Exclusive”. Essentially, that means that it came preloaded with Amazon bloatware, and that the bootloader was locked. Ok fine, whatever. I was working at the time, and I really needed the phone. I was on pager rotation too. I could – and did – write it off as a work expense.
Fast forward 2 years to September of 2020. That was when my Moto G6 stopped receiving updates, even security updates. In a sane world, I would’ve just installed a third-party ROM like Lineage and gone about my business. After all, I had managed to add years of useful life to a previous phone by doing just that. But recall that my Motorola has a locked bootloader. Motorola does have a website that will let you unlock the bootloader on their devices, but they wouldn’t give me an unlock code, because the phone was sold through Amazon and locked to Amazon. I do still have it around here somewhere. If someone wants a ticking time bomb, I’ll gladly sell it. Addendum: I called both Amazon and Motorola. Both refuse to unlock the bootloader on it, even though it is well out of warranty and hasn’t received software updates in over 3.5 years.
Fast forward to May of 2023, when I decided to buy an iPhone. Essentially, I did it because I got tired of hearing my girlfriend Deedra complain every time I borrowed her phone to scan printed mail and other items. I bought it off Ebay, as open-box. It’s cheap, I don’t have a lot of money, and I’d rather not pay premium prices to Apple for something brand new. Their phones do at least have great accessibility. The details on this phone claimed that it was an unlocked iPhone 2022 SE. But I was asked a bunch of customization questions, including “select network”. What the hell. So I left AT&T selected.
