Why is Pixel Pass being discontinued?
We offer the best value of our hardware products and give users the flexibility to purchase their favorite services. We continue to evaluate offers based on customer feedback and provide different ways for them to access the best of Google.
The headline and a lot of the article are trying to give the impression Google is screwing customers out of what they paid for even though the article itself admits they’re still going to honor the deal for existing customers. They just won’t be extending contracts or writing new ones. Seems like the author is trying really hard to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Upgrading would have involved signing a new 2 year deal. It's just a fancy-sounding financing program; the 2 years were to pay for the device they've had for 2 years. I'll never understand the appeal of buying a high-end/expensive phone on such a program because you'll be stuck paying for something outdated by the end of it, but shrug, that's not unique to Google.
I suppose that's true for some types of financing, but looking more into this particular plan, it all comes down to how much you value the bundled services... and they don't seem stellar to me. The math I'm seeing from the time of announcement suggests you'd pay $1080 for a $599 smartphone or $1320 for a $899 smartphone. Even if you were planning on paying for YouTube Premium at full price, inflation still has a tough time beating that.
It’s one of those things where people put value in the opportunity. Some people would not have bought a new phone at the time if not for the chance to get the new phone in the future. So while this was a fancy word for financing the phone and bundling of services at a discount, and people aren’t losing a phone they “paid for,” people did pay for it because of the perk.
People aren’t really losing money because of this being cancelled, but some of them only paid for the program in the first place because of something they aren’t now getting.
Sure did which makes me wonder how hard you had to try to intentionally miss the point. Shilling super hard to try and make it seem like Google didn’t set up yet another service with promises that they decided to just cancel without warning after getting enough people hooked into their hardware. Obviously they’re not kicking people off their contracts because they’d get sued and that’s not the point and you know it. How does Google boot leather taste btw?
I think it’s because of the original marketing for Pixel Pass. Google marketed it as being better value than other post-paid mobile phone plan arrangements in some way. It’s just the same boilerplate terms under which a large proportion of mobile phones have been sold for decades in my country - so it was confusing when Google tried to sell me “a new way to buy a phone” where literally the only new thing about it was that you can get discounted Google services bundled. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are getting pissed off about it now for not receiving value that was never actually offered.
The advertised “regular device upgrades” will never happen for anyone as part of Pixel Pass, even customers who battled Google’s servers to order a Pixel 6 the moment they became available (it’s me; I’m one of those people) because there’s still more than a month to go before the very first customers in would cross the two-year mark and be eligible to upgrade.
So a core part of the premise of Pixel Pass (device upgrades) is being lost, even to existing Pixel Pass users.
Original marketing from 2021:
Pixel Pass brings together the latest Pixel phone with Google’s best mobile services, device protection and regular device upgrades — all in one easy subscription. (emphasis added)
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