Xbox All Access - Microsoft's console gaming payment plan

Right, and I think Brad’s overestimating the number of people buying phones outright these days. AT&T Next and plans like it are a thing for a very good reason. Sure, you own the phone at the end, which is great, but people are still using payment plans via their carrier to get their phones.

Those plans also are essentially 0% loans; for example the iPhone 8 costs $699 and Verizon charges $29.14/month for 24 months. The advantage of those carrier finance plans is they also allow you to trade-in your phone for a new one every year, with the downside being that if you do that you never end up owning your hardware.

There are also subsidies and deals; they just tend to be six months post-release for Apple hardware. My parents got two iPhone 8+'s for the price of one. And you can usually find deals on top-end Android phones right at release.

Obviously the price was hidden in the cost of the service, but they were widely marketed as phone subsidies and that’s how they were understood by many people.

Kinda. The truth was at that time you didn’t pay any less by not being under contract and all the main carriers were the same price. So the only way you were “paying more” was if you were planning to switch to an MNVO but couldn’t cause of your contract. If you were happy with Verizon/AT&T/etc… there was very little downside to staying under contract for a lower price of a phone.

That’s no longer the case with the way phone plans work now though.