If you have carrier-financed phone and don't pay your wireless bill, they can blacklist your IMEI.

It isn't just iOS/Android devices, online product activation has made its way into all sorts of things.

Awhile back Bird decided to discontinue their connected services for some of the retail e-scooters they'd sold. If you didn't have your scooter charged up when the command was sent to leave it in a permanently unlocked state, you now own a brick.

Shady car lots often sell cars that disable themselves even if you do keep paying.

The absolutely most boneheaded Tesla UI decision was putting the speedometer on the infotainment. Anecdotally, driving around central Florida I almost never see a Tesla driver doing the usual "speed limit +5" - they're always either flying like a bat out of hell, or driving like Mr. Magoo. The worst ones are the drivers who alternate between both: they go slow as shit until someone tries to pass them, then they take off like a maniac, then begin slowing down again - pretty much the sort of behavior you might expect from someone with a busted speedometer.

A few years back when my partner and I test drove a Model 3, I think we spent more time Googling things than actually driving the damn car. I'm sure once you get past the learning curve it's not so bad, but ultimately neither of us wanted to deal with that. For all the crap Chevy gets over "bad software", they did a damn good job just making the Bolt be a normal car that happens to be powered by electrons rather than dinosaur juice. That was what ultimately sealed the deal.

Also, back then the Bolt had CarPlay, which the more I've come to rely on, the less I'd be willing to own a vehicle that lacks it.

There's eventually going to be the Slate Truck, if you really want that early 90s throwback vibe. Personally, I'd rather have something a bit less spartan, even if it means that every once in awhile it nags me for not subscribing to OnStar. Different strokes for different folks.

(99 * 12) / (5 * 52) = $4.57/day

It's really easy to burn up more than this on tolls, especially here in Florida. Yeah, you'd have to leave a bit earlier to use FSD as a substitute for toll roads, but most of the stress of dealing with traffic is actually having to do the annoying stop-and-go pedal dance.

I'm not simping for Musk here, heck, I don't even own a Tesla, but I'm just pointing out that people absolutely do already spend this kind of money just to get to their destination without the hassle of being stuck in traffic (well, most of the time - occasionally you do end up unlucky enough to pay tolls for the privilege of still sitting in miserable traffic).

I'm sure many "Future Phone Purchase Jars" start off with the best of intentions but quickly turn into the "White Claw Fund" instead.

It receives critical security patches, not updates. I actually have an iPhone around this vintage (6S) still kicking around in my junk drawer and there are quite a few major apps that can no longer be installed on it due to its outdated iOS version.

Granted, that is still an improvement over the "if you end up pwned, it's your fault for using an obsolete phone" way things work in the Android realm, but it's disingenuous to make it seem like an iPhone stays fully functional for a decade. At least in my own experience, any iOS device starts feeling long in the tooth performance wise after the 3 year mark, and I'm sure that's not a coincidence.

Man, nobody ever reads The Rules of Acquisition these days. Exploitation begins at home; make the kids get jobs.

Usually, you can score a deal on a phone by churning between carriers every time one runs a compelling promotion. The main problem with this strategy is for folks who live in rural areas where only one carrier works well.

The downside to the US's carrier-subsidized phone business model is that the money still has to come from somewhere, and it does - in the form of higher service costs.

Ultimately, how bad of a deal this turns out to be hinges on how much worse it screws you compared against buying a phone and then trading it back in for Apple's perpetually lowball trade-in values. Upgrade-itis is expensive.

But for a brief moment they did sell a sort-of cheap laptop.

Thanks to T-Mobile's latest cash grab, I ditched my grandfathered plan and ported to Visible. Even though it's a Verizon subsidiary, that doesn't fly with Apple when it comes to doing their 0% Apple Card financing (you have to be on a postpaid plan one one of the "big 3" networks). I'm just gonna ride the phone I have for a few more years and like that option for fording a river in Oregon Trail, wait and see if the situation improves.

In the early days of the Apple Card, it was pretty easy to get approved. That leniency is probably never coming back with Chase at the helm, so Apple needed a new way of turning folks with subprime credit into customers.

Yeah, there's an argument to be made that people who can only afford to lease Apple products should probably go with something else that's more budget-friendly instead, but more often than not you don't end up with poor credit in the first place if you're strict about sticking to your budget.