It's junk. 4 years old. Scratched up, cracked screen. Obsolete. Why do they want it so bad? They say they'll even give me a new phone for free or a heavily discounted one if I'll simply give them my 4 year old old phone. Seems suspicious.
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Look up the fine print. 99% likely they aren't giving you a phone directly for free. What they will do is give you an interest free loan for three years, with a monthly credit for that amount. So a net of zero per month, but it cannot be deal with early without paying off the loan and losing the credit. Therefore it's a much higher barrier for you to leave. That's what they really want.
You turning in your old phone isn't of much other value than narrowing the road you can turn around on so you can't go back. Example--most offer a return policy of some sort 30 days or whatever. 25 days in you decide the new phone, new service, whatever is not suitable, you can return the phone and if you switched carriers your old one will happily take you back. Oh, but wait, you traded in your old phone and sorry it's totally gone into the abyss and will not be coming back to you. Sure, you can leave, but about that loan we gave you for the new phone. We will take our $1000 for that now.
This is all correct but I have one minor addition. They might give you a tiny credit for your old phone. The one they offered me 6 or 7 years ago was $5. So instead of a $1000 loan it's $995. I passed on that.
I was actually in this situation with Xfinity a few years back. They offered me a good deal on bundling my phone and internet but of course my phone wasn't "eligible". I made sure I wasn't locked into a contract and pulled the trigger. It turns out the plan I wanted was $10/month higher than they told me but it was still a good deal so whatever. Several months later I moved places and had to cancel internet. Xfinity's prices are horrible if you're not bundling more than one service, so I looked into canceling. The phones I get are pretty cheap so fortunately the loan was only a couple hundred dollars. It was cheaper to pay that off than spend another 18 months paying Xfinity's inflated monthly prices. Then they made it as difficult as possible within the bounds of the law to port my number to a new carrier when I did switch. I never had a problem with their service but thanks to the bad faith crap they subjected me to on my way out I'll never do business with those faggots again.
They still made you think that getting ass raped by them was to your advantage. ;)