What a fantastic piece by a really good author. Worth reading in its entireity, long as it is.

Na homie that was almost 10 years ago.

Playing devils advocate here but… I suspect what is happening here is a previous purchaser bought it (broke it?), returned it under a different reason (eg. I dint like it) and Amazon decided it is not worth the hassle of rechecking every return labeled as such.

Mind you this is no consolation for someone like you who has go to through this return process, but I cant believe Amazon is “winning” by keeping a defective product like this in rotation long enough for someone to “eat the cost”. Defective products hurt Amazon as well and I’m sure they’d rather take the hit if they could pin point which products are defective.

You could argue that they should bear the cost of validating every return, but clearly someone has crunched the numbers and the program is likely not cost effective.

If I understand correctly, carrier locking is different from Bootloader locking. One implies freedom to use the device on any provider network, while the other is for installing a custom ROM. A Samsung flagship can be bought unlocked by paying full price, but you cannot unlock the bootloader and install Graphene, for instance.