> Lots of back-and-forth games on pricing, getting upsold on random add-ons or financial products ... I doubt I'd be worse off paying a standard price set by th

> Lots of back-and-forth games on pricing, getting upsold on random add-ons or financial products ... I doubt I'd be worse off paying a standard price set by the manufacturer While this sounds good in theory, what's to prevent the manufacturer from doing the same ? If you look at Google Fi, it probably wanted to be different from the usual carriers, but in reality they are not that much different and worse in many ways. They peddle the same overpriced phones/payment plans and try to keep you on the network, blurring the line between device cost and plan cost. They also distinguish between regular data and hotspot data. If you go back to AOSP in Nexus days, AOSP didn't have any distinction between the two.