> It seems lame that you have to phone home to unlock a new device, but it's nothing compared to what they could be doing. My guess is that it's protection aga

> It seems lame that you have to phone home to unlock a new device, but it's nothing compared to what they could be doing. My guess is that it's protection against stolen hardware? They can basically ban S/N of stolen phones, and the thieves can't unlock the bootloader and resell the device. But yeah, it seems like a reasonable thing. Out of all the vendors, Pixel phones are by far the easiest to unlcok, seems like a weird thing to complain about.