My grandmother had a phone that she was renting for decades. That phone cost thousands of dollars by the time my mom explained to her that she was allowed to replace it with a purchased phone. AT&T forced people to get their phones from AT&T for decades, until regulation forced them to stop that practice, and even after that they continued to bill people for those phones...often older folks who didn't understand their bills or their rights. That's not poor support, that's evil. Of course, AT&T had a state-sponsored monopoly, so it wasn't all their fault...something about state+corporate cooperation makes everybody involved behave in the worst possible way.