I’m getting my phone on a loan at 0%. If I want to switch carriers, then I’ll pay off the rest of the cost of my phone and they unlock it for me, but considering we’ve been running rather insane inflation over the last few years, I’m glad I made AT&T pick up that tab. I see no point in buying outright as I’m not changing carriers multiple times in a year.
My work pays me a stipend if I stay on one of the big three since they have SLAs with them, so it’s hard to beat the price. $20 for 50 GB 5G is my out of pocket because I wanted to put my AppleWatch on the plan.