Absolutely agree with everything you said. For music I absolutely prefer my speaker setup over any headphones or IEMs. But I go running pretty much every day for like an hour and I also walk a lot. So I need music during all that and like I said the slight noise present with bluetooth headphones bothers me an unreasonable amount.

I’ll most likely go for a sony phone next too case they’re pretty much the only flagship phone offering both an sdcard slot and a 3.5mm jack.

Perfectly fair take tbh, in terms of security on android phones grapheneOS is as good as it gets and has been for a couple of years. I personally refuse to use pixels due to no sdcard, but more importantly no 3.5mm jack. The slight hiss/hum noise present on every bluetooth headset I’ve tried (and I’ve tired my friends bluetooth sennheiser that’s like $600) bothers me way too much for w/e reason. I find crdroid for example gets me 90% of the way there with a bit of work through various magisk modules and it’s good enough for me. But things have definitely gotten better on nonpixel phones over the years, I’m for example running a poco x3 nfc that was $250 4 years ago when I bought it and I still get monthly security updates through crdroid anf battery life is still great cause it came with a 5300mAh battery.

But besides, being able to unlock bootloader is great (even though root is way more important to me)

My bad I thought you were generally up to date with how rooting basically works nowadays. The defacto rooting method today is systemless root using magisk, which works by patching your boot.img. So on 99% of phones today if you can unlock the bootloader, rooting is as simple as installing the magisk, patching the boot img from the app and the flashing itl. You can also just flash magisk from recovery too. That’s why I focused on bootloader unlocking in my previous post.

Now I can’t claim that every device from these manufacturers works flawlessly with magisk, but most do. And a quick glance at the xda page of the specific model would be an easy way to find out before buying.

No wonder, as they’re the only phones left (to my knowledge) that don’t demand half your soul just to fucking own your own phone.

Literally who outside of samsung and Huawei? I guess xiaomi is a bit annoying with the wait time but pretty much all other phones are dead simple.

Oneplus, Nothing phone: literally the same process as on a pixel, no code required to unlock bootloader or anything like that. Just fastboot flashing unlock

Vivo: The exact same thing, just get vivo’s binary for fastboot since the unlocl command is different

Motorola, Sony: Just go to the website and you get the unlock code instantly, then just run a fastboot command and you’re done

Realme: Download their app, apply for unlock, gets approved within an hour. Unlock with a fastboot command

Xiaomi, poco: Get their app, wait a couple of days for the code, unlock bootloader with fastboot command.

Honor and huawie are a pita, but there is an open source unlocking tool for certain devices which makes it deadsimple.

So there are still plenty of options if the goal is unlocking bootloader and rooting a phone, all of these brands offer phones with oled 120hz screens, with cameras ranging from decent to some of the best on the market depending on the model. There are probably some brends I missed, but you get the point.