Modern smartphones annoy the piss out of me. My current daily driver's battery is dying and due to that and some other issues. I felt it was time for a new phone. And so the wrangling began. I wanted a phone with 5G, an SD card slot, and the ability to install LineageOS. The newest phones on that list that I could reasonably acquire were a Xiaomi phone from 2021, or the Fairphone 4. Either way, I'd be losing a headphone jack, feh.

The latter was expensive, and I was miffed at Fairphone and Murena for shipping the Fairphone 4 to the US less than a month before the Fairphone 5 came out. Plus, the 8GB version was out of stock and I didn't want to buy the 6GB version and have it be dog slow later.

So, I waffled. I thought about other options. And then last week I decided to buy the Xiaomi phone. It was cheaper -- and even cheaper used! -- and it would get here within a few days.

Well, today, it arrived. I thought I'd have trouble unlocking the bootloader. But no, it was worse than that. The phone shipped with the factory reset protection tripped, meaning I'd need to log in with the previous owner's Google account. Which, of course, I did not have.

And so now the phone I paid $250 from a legitimate seller is a useless brick to me, for no goddamn reason besides a policy that says it's for theft protection but ultimately reduces the resale value. It's going back to Amazon when I have the time to. And I'll have to pony up $600+ for a phone that has barely 3 years of support and will probably be replaced in the US by the Fairphone 5 within a year. Gods damn it all.

#DRM #Android #Google #DefectiveByDesign #Fairphone #FactoryResetProtection