Nah, nothing that I want is ever a good price. I think it's well established by now that places raise prices leading into black friday to make the deals seem better than they are.

I'm keep to get a Pixel phone and install GrapheneOS on it (because that's my idea of fun). I have been looking for a second hand one on trademe but I'd like a 256GB storage model and apparently no one buys Pixel 7s with any more than 128GB. I'll monitor for a while and see if any come up.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I've seen a lot of posts online talking about that. Though I usually have a list of things I've been looking at for a while, so I know their 'regular' prices, and can always compare to that.

I've heard of GrapheneOS, and have always been meaning to do some more reading into it - and I've always wanted a pixel phone, but they make it such a hassle to get one in NZ.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you pop on Pricespy.co.nz there are plenty of places selling Pixels (unofficially). GrapheneOS only supports Pixels, though there are other OSs that support other models. My understanding is that Pixels are the only ones where you can re-lock the bootloader after installing a custom OS, making it more secure.

I'm really keen to get one because I want to see if I can live without the google integrations. No play store, no google notification service, no google on my phone.

I reckon I'll struggle but it's fun to try 😆

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that's the thing. I wonder why they can't start selling them here "officially" lol.

Yeah, I think no google would be pretty tough, but i'd like to try and diversify and have the backup option if needed :)

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think when you're at the lower volume, more specialist end of the market it's hard to justify the effort needed to go to all the different countries and learn the rules of selling there. Steam still doesn't sell hardware to NZ (Steam Deck, Index), Framework laptops are not available here, and Google Pixels aren't available. Places normally expand sequentially to big markets. US->Canada->EU->UK->Australia. We don't have the population to pull in anything but the big players (think Apple or Samsung vs Google Pixel).

We actually had Warehouse Stationary stocking the Google Nexus phones that came before the Pixel line, I had a Nexus 4 and 5 back in the day. I remember my wife and I both had Nexus 4s and they both bricked with the same issue, and the shop didn't argue because it was a known issue. Got 18 months of use from a phone then got a refund, so not bad.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I guess the "why" is explainable, but it's so frustrating haha.