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If I'm not mistaken, did they not basically offer a credit of however much the user paid into that towards the next Pixel?
Like, obviously that wasn't the fucking deal, but it would certainly be better than just "we stole your money fuck off."
they offered discount coupons. the users hadn't paid for the next pixel yet, they were paying off their original one
This. The deal was when you sign up Google sends you a Pixel and then you pay it off over 2 years with Pixel Pass. You were basically renting to own - if you cancelled your plan early, you had to pay off the rest of the phone.
Google sucks and kills loads of good products but almost everyone has wildly misunderstood what actually happened here and it's kind of infuriating. (Also, Pixel Pass was kind of a bad deal for most people anyway.)
A ton of the people affected "misunderstood" it in the same way while it was happening, because it was advertised, apparently, as that
which is weird, because they already let you do that. i've been buying pixels on credit, interest free 2-year terms, from them since like the pixel 2. i figured there would be some advantage to using the pixel pass but i straight up could not figure out why i would ever want to switch over to it because it would wind up being a bit more expensive.
is that only possible if you're on fi or something? i genuinely don't get it
i think it came with unlimited cloud storage? which is just a lock-in play in the long term
This was what I generally saw reported, so I think your assessment was right. It was a slim discount assuming you wanted to buy a phone at full price and all the services that came with the pass. Overall, very paltry savings in exchange for complete platform lock-in.
This was different than the other pixel phone upgrade program that also lets you upgrade your phone after two years (that I think I'm still on but also haven't checked)