The Pros and Cons of Buying Phones from Your Carrier
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I’m sure you’ve heard it a hundred times: don’t buy phones from your carrier. The thing is, it’s not that black and white. There are legitimate reasons why it’s okay to buy from your carrier…on top of the reasons you may want to avoid it. Let’s talk about the pros and cons.
The History of Carrier-Sold Phones
Travel with me, if you will, back to ancient times. To a time before smartphones, when flip phones ruled the land. In these olden days of cellular devices, there was only one real option for buying a phone: from your carrier. This involved getting a phone for a small payment—$50 or $100 in most cases, or even free for the “non-flagship” handsets of the day. In return, you’d sign a two-year agreement with your carrier saying that you’d stick with them. Seems great, right?
What they didn’t tell you is that they paid very little for that plastic flip phone, so they actually made a killing off of you. I mean, I get that every business is out to make money, but they really took you for a lot with this old model. But since there wasn’t another option, that’s just how it was—and this continued well into the smartphone era. You’d buy a phone for $200 with a two-year contract, but that phone wasn’t really $200—it was more like $650, you just paid the rest in fees over time.
Now, things have changed. If you go to your carrier to buy a phone, the price tag says the true price—$650 for a lot of those flagship smartphones—and you can either pay it in full or pay it off over time with an interest-free financing plan, no contract required.
The Modern Dilemma
However, there is a big catch to buying a phone from your carrier: it’s locked to that carrier. That means you can’t take it to another carrier unless it first gets unlocked by the original one—and even then, your phone may only be compatible with another carrier of the same type: GSM (AT&T and T-Mobile) or CDMA (Verizon and Sprint).
That means if you buy a phone from the Verizon store, you can only use that phone on Verizon. Once you pay it off, you can get it unlocked by the folks at Verizon, then take it to Sprint or one of the other smaller CDMA networks. You can’t, however, necessarily take it to AT&T or T-Mobile, unless it’s a phone that’s compatible with both types of networks (like the iPhone or Google Pixel).
If, however, you were to buy that phone from the manufacturer directly—say, buying a Samsung phone from samsung.com (or buying it unlocked from a store like Best Buy)—you could take it to any compatible carrier right away, without having to go through the hassle of unlocking it first.
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