A decade of corporate brainwashing has convinced people that only criminals want to control the device they own.

Most people don't own, they use payment plans

And if a person loses the phone one month into their payment plan they still have to pay for the entire price of the phone. So you take ownership the moment you make an agreement with the company to make payments.

Payment plans seem like absolute insanity to me. Everyone I know on one is paying $100+ AUD per month perpetually since as soon as they have paid it off they get a new phone.

I have found that it is insanely cheap to just buy last years phone second hand. I picked up a pixel 2 recently for $300 AUD when it was about $1000 the year before.

If one is going to buy the phone anyway, payment plans with 0% interest make a lot of sense (from the buyer's perspective).

I suspect that for a lot of people, without the payment plan they would not buy anyway since they can't afford to buy these outrageously expensive devices outright.

To everyone their own. I very much respect your approach. But when I'm upgrading I don't want last year's model. My phone is the single most used "possession" in my life and after using one for two years, I like to treat myself.

The thing is if you always sit a year or 2 behind the cutting edge you still get to treat yourself because every upgrade is a huge jump in technology from what you had before. Unless you are comparing yourself to others it really doesn't matter because you still get something better and new to you.

Indeed. To be honest it seems like madness to me that phone contracts don't include some kind of insurance as standard.

I've always bought my phones outright but my girlfriend recently had her phone stolen in London about a month after getting it and you can imagine how painful that was for her.

From a technical perspective, both users have (or lack) equal access to their hardware. So the actual method of ownership isn't really relevant.

Jailbreak is a good way to let criminals to control your phone.