| >> What gets missed in this discussion is that John Deere and other large machine manufacture[r]s offset the purchase price of these machines with the expected cost of maintenance for the lifetime of the machine. This lets business owners (in this case farmers) obtain financing for machines that might in other situations be difficult to obtain. That would be fine and dandy if there were a *choice* to discount the price in exchange for the reduced degree of ownership. (And if they were decent folks, once equity had been fully paid off they would unlock everything). The reality is nothing more than rent-seeking MBA bastards trying to improve their own bottom line. It's dangerous when companies get into the financing business with their products and dictate the terms in user-hostile ways for which you have zero bargaining power. You wind up with problems like phones you can't transfer to another provider and cars that want to lock you out if you're late on a payment. As consumers our best way to fight this bullshit is to just say NO, and stop buying products that are encumbered with such shenanigans. It's one reason I never buy my phone from the same company that sells my service. I hold the unorthodox view they have no business being device resellers, and I wish they just stuck to selling me airtime and focused on being good at that (fast speeds, good coverage, network capacity, customer service, etc). Instead they load products up with bloatware, and over time poisoned the incentives of manufacturers to prioritize their interests over my own user experience. In any event I find better deals and truly unlocked units off eBay, usually from a region of the world where the model supports the ROM I prefer to use. Unfortunately it's becoming harder in practice to locate alternative supply, and not everyone is in a position to make this principled choice. Some can't afford it, but most of us are ambivalent and just want to get a phone and get on with our lives. A traditional financing outfit could care less about restricting what features you can use on your product or who you're allowed to pay to fix or upgrade it (as long as the repairs are competent, which is justifiable seeing as they are part-owners, and such conditions are all lifted once you buy them out). While I dislike government dictating relationships between businesses and consumers, I feel like there should be anti-compete laws to keep some degree of separation between corporations "product" and "financing" arms to avoid customer-harming conflicts of interest. Particularly when that corporation is the manufacturer. There's just too much temptation for them to degrade toward the direction I described above, and in practice not enough market diversity for consumers to fight back in other ways. ____ Edit: Quoted portion of your post so folks who can't see the text of deleted comments have some context. |