A few months ago, I got a cellular iPad Air 2 on my dad's plan because it was only $99 on contract. I don't know why this was, because AT&T had no info on this promotion, yet the store I bought it from sold it to me for that much anyway. They didn't tell me about the $45 activation fee when I bought it, nor the $15 activation fee when he added my sister to his plan a few days before. He called an AT&T rep, who called the store to verify that they didn't mention the activation fee, and it was waved.Wow - my apologies for missing that 2-year-contract item for tablets. To be honest, I've only looked at adding a tablet I already owned to an existing account, so the activation was the lower amount and there wasn't any sort of obligation. The fact that an iPad mini 2 bought through AT&T with a payment plan has an activation fee of $20, yet on a 2-year-contract, it's $45 (on the same screen with the online store!) is downright criminal. I'm sort of surprised they're not charging $20 or $45 for the "device only (no plan required)" option. For posterity, hotspots are $45 on contract and $0 if paid-in-full (again, inconsistencies).
But I thought that was pretty ridiculous that we both added a new line, but mine was three times higher because I got my device on contract.
Yep. Especially when you can go to Walmart and buy an activation kit with account credit for less than the amount of credit you get. An activation kit with $30 credit at Walmart right now is only $29.87.Agreed - when I tried T-Mobile earlier, I thought the $15 was steep for the SIM in the store (had to establish the account and such), so I went and added our other lines online when they were running a promo for 99¢ SIMs.
Normally I'd agree with this, but having separate models with pre-installed SIMs actually helped me get an iPhone SE faster.I think there's a lot of folks on the various iPhone SE threads (and probably at Apple Stores, too) that would wholeheartedly agree with you. Less inventory of devices with pre-installed SIMs floating around and not running into the "I want a Verizon iPhone on a payment plan, but they only had T-Mobile and AT&T models in stock" problem that some were having (despite the model itself being the same). Install the SIM on the spot to activate and lock the phone to the carrier, and ship one in the package if it's being sent to customers. There's probably good reason for the way things are now, but it amazes me the number of people that have no idea their iPhone even takes a SIM card. The Apple SIM was a good first step, but when companies opt-out (Verizon) or do sneaky crap (permanently locking the SIM down on AT&T), there's still a ways to go.
Honestly, if I had internet at my apartment and/or lost unlimited data with Verizon, I would just use RingPlus full time. Sprint's service isn't as good as Verizon or AT&T, but I'd save so much money. I did have to pay $15 for a SIM card to use RingPlus, but I'm more than happy to overpay for a SIM card when I get free service every month.It seems it's really finding the least of all the evils for you when it comes to carriers. There were a lot of things that I enjoyed with T-Mobile, although I had a few family members that didn't have as good of coverage as we initially expected where they lived, so we went back to AT&T for now (better discount through work than Verizon and almost identical coverage in my area). Unfortunately, it sort of seems like the fees are a take-it-or-leave-it situation and there really isn't much recourse.