Apple Plans to Defeat RAM Prices by Letting You Lease a Mac
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207 replies
Lmao. So now I can use my rented services on my rented laptop! I can go get the laptop in my rented car, to go back home to my rented place… it really is going to be you’ll own nothing and like it.
You will own nothing but corporations will still hold you, the consumer, responsible when their decisions have catastrophic outcomes for everybody.
Here's a solution for you. Use your old MacBook, the one with 2GB of RAM. Use your old copy of Office 2008, the one that requires no subscription and offers no AI assistant. Stop paying for Spotify, find your old mp3 collection, convert all those CDs you never play anymore. You want television? Don't pay subscriptions for that either, buy an HD antenna, get your local stations over the air. If it doesn't have everything you want, suck it up or pirate it, your call.
My point is, you can choose a different path, but it takes a choice.
You know, dumb flip phones are coming back, people are realizing they don't need all the crap they're paying for, it doesn't all make life better. It takes conviction to trade in your smart phone for a dumb one, but people are doing it.
Why would you make it harder than it is?
libre office and you got an open source Office suite
That's legit, I mean I use Libre myself.
I guess I brought up old MS Office to point out that the world was not always like this, it used to be that sanity was mainstream.
Libre office got me through college without having to pay for ms office.. which they still charged for even with a student discount.
PIRATE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Great film, I recommend it.
TBF I self host and use Arch (btw) I was just making a supply joke, but your point stands.
That said, people need things, sometimes you have to buy new things, and if so, don’t feel bad, try to make good choices, but you also have to take care of yourself.
In many countries you can use IPTV to get the public channels too and it's totally legal
You forgot about using your rented Mac for playing rented games, music and movies.
Mac’s can play games????
Wow what are you trying to say
Go ahead, i can take it
I love you. 🥺
I love you and i hope you have/had a great day!
You aren't a player and it's ridiculous that some people think otherwise
Bungie made mostly Mac games until Microsoft bought them. Marathon (the original) was a Mac game.
Yeah, they always have.
It's their only option when people can't afford shit
End stage capitalism boys. Its down the tubes until collapse/revolution.
I mean, its decidedly not, but its certainly the option that means the least effort and most profit on their part.
Such a stupid saying. Nobody likes it.
Average rental enjoyer..
By owning nothing we can afford to have everything we want.
You will own nothing
This was so insanely predictable. I wouldnt be surprised if all the tech giants move to do the same. "you will own nothing"
The beginning of HaaS (Hardware as a service)
[it is very bad]
It’s already here unfortunately. For example, you can now lease a PlayStation 5
We used to rent a PS2 from blockbuster back when it was the current gen lol
Yeah, and you could rent VCRs long before that.
Not the beginning, 'Device as a Service' has been the buzzword as of late, but basically has been a thing for decades. I remember twenty years ago scratching my head at why the company I worked at paid more to lease desktops for three years than it would have cost to just buy them outright, or even finance them.
The amount we spend on cloud hosting I keep suggesting (and I think they are starting to listen) that having on-prem hardware makes financial sense again. We have the staff to run them already anyway.
Heh, to some extent I think the hardware vendors have done this to themselves.
They try to balance "good TCO if you just buy it" but simultaneously say "but it sucks to own the equipment you need to pay us exorbitant services fees to make it easier to own".
Nothing unique to IT, certainly car manufacturers love to first sell you on how robust the car is and then try to scare you into thinking it'll turn to dust if you don't buy extended warranties...
I do agree, but I like nividia ge force. The thing where my tv is a high end rig for like $10 for a month.
The cloud is already a thing.
F U C K
T H A T
You’re still paying for the more expensive ram. It’s just baked into a higher monthly rental payment. Why pay more for ram one time when you could pay more for ram every month for the rest of your life?
When a company says it has a "solution" for the high price, they means they have a "solution" for the big number on the sticker. Not that they actually care about affordability.
when the $ numbers start getting big and scary, just extend the length some more to make it look 'cheaper'.. like 8 year car loans and 50 year mortgages.
Yeah, had a car dealer try to say "the price doesn't even matter, only the monthly payment matters, right?"
The problem for those of us who know better: this reasoning works on most of the customers and it's more profitable to do that than cater to more savvy customers.
I'd rather go back to 2007 and main my Intel Core 2 Duo than rent a PC. We're going backwards not forwards guys...
There it is.
You stole the words right out of mouth. The beginning of not owning your own computer.
That's how it also started, with time-sharing terminals because hardware was way too expensive.
It's nice when the bad guy wears a black hat and twiddles their mustache, isn't it? Really helps to speed things up.
Those of us paying attention have been waiting for this moment. It's great living through end stage capitalism!
I am so happy I built a new computer at the end of 2024. It may realistically last me two decades at this rate. I got one decade out of the last build.
I maxed out my configuration at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD around the same time.
On a practical note: we need to mock this to the point that anyone who actually does it will instantly be a social pariah. This needs to be so embarrassingly stupid that the companies who offer it literally blush, something non-human entities typically can't do. Gamers Nexus had a good video about NZXT doing this and broke down the math for the numerically challenged.
Any other ideas for making this fail in a country where the consumer protection agencies are often worse than nobody paying attention at all?
yes ... but remember the horse armor? people do be gullible
Honestly, the level of doublethink on display by some Apple fans is impressive normally but this is amazing. Apple "defeats" RAM prices by making you pay for something several times over while not actually getting to own it? Fucking bootlickers.
If you give it back with scratches on it, will you be into negative equity? 😬 I assume it'll come with all the bad parts of car leasing, too...
And yet somehow worse. Don't have to spend hours finding important files on my car's hard drive before returning it to the dealership
You’ll need your own storage to backup before erasing and turning it in, but they probably know that and will factor that in for a fee.
“Rent X months, get an SSD with your backup for free when you cancel your subscription.”
They’ll likely try to upsell you on iCloud services as well. Your entire life will be digitized and uploaded into the cloud, onto some corporate computer somewhere.
My issue with this is that you can often get a cheap laptop used, and major cities often have libraries that rent laptops to residents, if needed. And paying your library is cheaper than paying Apple, plus the money goes to the local library.📚
Good news!
/s
If they haven't already they definitely want you to save everything on "the cloud", before people realize "the cloud" just means "data center".
Great! I can now enter a prompt into a data-center-hosted LLM, "do my job," and the data center will conveniently also store the resulting fraudulent work product in the same location, while I relax at home on a permanent unpaid vacation! So convenient!
The lease contract includes 30,000 cpu-core-hours, any additional time will be billed at $0.10 per cpu-core-hour.
/s
Jfc, stop giving them ideas!
I see the /s there, but it feels as likely as not.
My assumption is the lease payments will more than cover the cost of the computer, and when you turn it back in at the end of the lease Apple is just going to scrap it.
I suppose that doesn't preclude them charging you extra if you return it all scratched up just to extract even more money from you.
Imagine leasing a laptop for only X number of charging cycles allowed.
"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy." WEF
Somehow chuds interpreted this as a decree of communism
Looks absurd, but I'm sure a lot of people will pay for it and next year we will have news about apple getting record profits
I'm too tired of all this
And people will say leasing is a great idea!
Enshittification
You just know that apple idiots will line up to get this.
Soon, you'll be having people leasing laptops and trading them in every year for the new model, perpetually paying a monthly fee to have the best and newest laptop from apple.
It's wild people don't see the parrel to how 99% of Americans "buy" new phones....
That's 100% what Apple is going for, laptops the same as iphones.
I have owned all my MacBooks for 5 years+, pretty sure it’s the windows users who buy new computers ever year because they buy garbage and Microsoft are encouraged to slow down computers over time
I use a 5 year old Mac mini at work and it’s faster than the thread ripper pro they originally gave me for what I do
Apple hate of this degree just smells like ignorance in this day and age
So has everyone else...
This program is new...
I said it's the same as all phones, if you're confused why I'm talking apple specifically, try reading the headline again, maybe ask Siri to explain the connection
I'd be more surprised if people weren't already doing this. They do with iPhones when they lease and upgrade with their carrier.
I don’t think people care as much about the latest and greatest laptop as they do smartphones. That mindset about phones is also just as true with Android fanboys as it is Apple fanboys. Apple haters love to criticize when Apple does something like this but when the rest of the industry follows suit, they show us how much non-Apple users eat that shit up too.
Yep its great cause I get new x every year. I have heard people say they want to lease appliances because they well get a new fridge or stove every couple years. And they want it cause new tech. We are our worst enmities. The waste this all produces is insane.
Sony was doing this with the fucking PS5.
Leasing is not renting
For tech stuff basically a financial entity buys the goods for you at full MSRP (they calculate a almost 100% depreciation over the term), then you pay that full price + interest over 48/60 installments, and when you're done, they take the goods back and sell it back via some liquidator.
And because the financial entity bought the stuff for you especially to lease it, you're contractually obligated to pay until the end of the contract, can't just get it for a month and then be done with it
You paid $1200 to use something worth $900 for four years and then it's not yours
Unless you're a business and the accountant says that's better for taxes, leasing something doesn't make sense
I hope you’re not saying this in general terms, because leasing absolutely has its benefits even to individuals, especially for cars.
for cars it makes sense only if you really need to have a new vehicle every 3 years and you really need to have an all inclusive insurance that covers everything
otherwise you save thousands by taking a loan, get limited liability insurance, then sell it after 5-6 years
although the absolute savings (for a newish vehicle and not a shitbox) is to get a used one ex-leasing (max 3 years old, low mileage, all maintenance made correctly because the leasing company paid for it) then sell it after 3-4 years (or keep it until it becames a shitbox)
Heck, even paying for full comprehensive insurance, you still come out ahead by buying on a loan and keeping it for more than 3 years.
The crux is that decently priced loans are denied to the people who actually need it, but leases are not.
And also that the car dealer takes a way fatter commission on a lease (commissions on insurances, commission on the extended warranty) so (at least here in my country) sometimes they "accidentally" incorrectly fill the request form with "wrong" data (like higher income, different employment status and so on)
Google novated leases and you’ll see why you’re wrong.
They seems better, never heard them before, not a thing in my country
It ain’t perfect but it’s pretty good and gets better all the time:
https://asahilinux.org/fedora/
Get an “old” m1 and rock out. Fuck Apple.
This is why I will never sell my M1 MBA.
M1 rules it’s lightning on asahi fedora
You will own nothing and fucking like it!
And there it is, you will own nothing and the apple chuds will enjoy it.
"defeat." I think you mean "realize their evil ambitions."
Wasn't this the goal from the start? With the inflated RAM prices, you not owning computing. Well, they'll surely find some idiots.
Just like investment real estate squatters buying up houses, driving up real estate costs, and then forcing you to rent.
Next, Apple keeps jacking up lease prices.
hahaha, no
That's...worse
Fuck this shit
There are deals to be had out there. I got a 2015 Dell Optiplex for $20 at a thrift shop. I got a cheap 128GB SSD and 16GB of DDR3 RAM for it. Unless you're a gamer, you probably don't need a new computer. Buy used when possible. Especially DO NOT rent one.
Yeah, gaming has been the boy equivalent of “fast fashion” for a while now.
Since I learned that I can edit configuration files in many games to lower graphics beyond what the game settings allow, so that I can run even recent releases in my low end pc, I don't plan to buy new hardware even for gaming (yes, the visuals will have lower quality, but these days, with all the shit happening around me, I don't even care anymore. Besides, they're usually not that bad)
Fuuuuck that.
I knew this was going to happen eventually but the fact that it's happened so soon is insane to me.
Companies with high-end products have the biggest profit margin cushions to deal with. I had little sympathy for Apple raising prices already, but this is absurd.
...Minus the payments already provided, right?
It's very vague. If you could use this as a rent-to-own it's perhaps not so bad, but if it's just rent-to-still-not-be-able-to-own it sucks.
You'll still pay way more.
This sounds exactly like what the major cell providers do with phones, or at least what AT&T does. Monthly interest-free payment to pay for the phone in 24 or 36 months, 'upgrade' available at half or an arbitrary percentage of the device having been paid off. It's 'your' device, but to sell it you have to pay off the balance remaining on the note. If you upgrade early, and the device is still in good condition, they zero out the note at that point, but it still counts as buying a new device, so you incur tax + an arbitrary 'activation' fee just like you bought a new device with cash.
You'll own nothing and like it.
Had to scroll down too far to find this.
Aaaand there we go, as predicted for the lady decade. You won't own anything and you'll like it. You will lease pur hardware and we will know everything about you.
Fuck all of this
Watch programmers and artists pay for lease.
A lot will. My last company leased their hardware. It cost more in the long run but for reasons I never understood it's better having expenses paid out of opex versus capex.
Yeah, I was in a room with a customer that said point blank "even if it costs us more in opex within a year than buying it as capex, we would rather rent the stuff as opex"
Some accounting bullshit makes them hate having anything that they must count as an "asset" that goes down in value over time. Better to burn the money as "expense" than to have to manage the value burning off over years as "depreciation".
Wow! How lucky are we?!! This also happens to coincide with Apple raising chocolate rations from 10 to 8!!!
Double plus good brother!
that's a lot of chocolate.
Thanks, but no.
What dystopian hell is this?!
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
HAH, how 'bout no!
Any idea when the Chinese RAMs are going to flood enough of the market to lower the price?
Given how long that would take, I'd guess that we will see OpenAI backing out of some of their purchasing commitments as a price pressure before then.
Sam Altman basically single handedly committed to buying almost half of the world's RAM capacity, and on other fronts OpenAI has already backing out of some of its more egregiously stupid business decisions. I'm sure the purchasing commitments are only a matter of time to come up on that chopping block.
We ALL hope so.
Kudos to them, if i cannot install my own software anymore and don't own the hardware, it could be leased as well. /s
Nice!
I always hated that I only get to pay for my computer once.
Macrumors is reporting it as an "Apple Upgrade" financing program to replace the existing iPhone Upgrade Program. Financing, not leasing.
Heh.
No.
Sounds on par with the rest of the tech oligarchy. Imagine missing a payment. You're in a business meeting and a tiny RC tow truck wheels in to haul it away.
Nah they just lock the screen with a message about making a payment to embarrass you.
You will own nothing!
This is their business model. I would never.
Dell has been doing it forever and has a strong business plan. Our company uses them so they can easily swap out laptops
When data is stored on servers, it's a different story, and you have an IT team supporting you.
Not the case for personal property, it's a shitty deal.
Shit like this just makes me wanna delete all the Apple compatibility stuff from my open source projects. It's not like they're fully realized (I cannot afford a Mac, not even a used one), but it just demotivates me from supporting their OSes and hardware.
You should delete apple anyway. Why does ANYONE use that garbage?
Switching to Apple with advanced data protection and HomeKit has been great for my big family. Way fewer tech support calls for me.
It was the most feasible option in the end. If it were just me, and I wasn’t raising kids and supporting aging parents, and working 50 hour work weeks, then I’d do graphene and home assistant. I’m just at a point that I want as much privacy as I can get for the least amount of maintenance.
That’s why I use the garbage. I was talked into it by my lunch group at work, who are sysadmin types, who switched for similar reasons.
Read the room, lol.
People who think they (still) make nice hardware. If anything, they made hardware worse by setting trends other manufacturers now also follow.
No one who has ever had to crack one open and work on it think they make nice hardware. Its consumer unfriendly trash.
You may not like it but Apple’s choices produce performant hardware and their laptops have had better battery life than other HW for what feels like well more than a decade. It could very well be harder to repair but I’ve had a ton of Mac’s and none have required repair.
I have 110 dell 5420 AIO PC's and fifteen 2019 mac AIO. I have had exactly one board failure, two screen failures and two nvme failures on the dells since 2019.
The 2019 dell AIO have had four bad screens which cost way more than the Dells to replace not counting extras like tape kits to reattach them. I've had five with bad ram. You have to completely disassemble them to change the ram. I've also had two of the macs develop non memory related failures. All of these were problems I had to fix after they went out of warranty. While they were in warranty I had one screen failure and one memory failure. So please tell me how good they are. I'm sure I will overlook the shit show time sink they represent for me to give your experience precedence over mine
That isn’t a gross overreaction at all. You seem like a delight to be around.
It isn't. You just lack the basic knowledge and experience to make the statements you make. Because I rub you the wrong way you can't imagine I get along just fine with people.
You have limited experience with a few apple products. I've had to deal with a sample of fifteen purchased at the same time from apple. My sample has a high failure rate. When I started having trouble with them I found others who were having similar problems.
Goodbye.
Leasing / renting will defeat RAM prices....somehow.
I know. Typical click bait headline.
Apple is in kind of a precarious position, though, aren't they? They're pretty much a hardware-first, consumer facing company.
If the crash manifests, they'll be in a good position, though.
Probably just defeating reduced sales. Its not for you, it is to benefit them.
I'll absolutely never touch that shit, but I am kinda curious what the pricing will look like.
How long does it take for buying to be cheaper than renting. How long before you are expected to get a new one - this is actually quite a big one, could it encourage more buying new laptops and so also improve the second hand market? Better and cheaper second hand laptops could be sweet.
Around here, people typically lease their phones. The numbers are intentionally obtuse and confusing because the lease is 2 years and then you can "buy it out" for a (still rather large) sum or roll it into a new model perpetually. You also get a discount from your service plan for leasing, putting the math outside your average adults ability.
Yeah quite a few people do that here, no interest in touching it myself. There is a huge supply of second hand phones though.
MBAs solve yet another case, which other problem will they create and solve, but not really, next time?
How is that a defeating ram prices for fucks sake. Only defeat is happening on user side. Is there any media that can’t publish pro corpo articles anymore?
Has media ever been capable of criticising Apple? They have always been the tech media darling from what I can recall.
🤮
Mah computer subscription is a monthly payment I can't miss.
I was like damn you almost got me the onion
Mkay.. just disinfect it, please. 🤓
After you return it, they shred it. It’s too hard to sanitise (both physically and in terms of configuration, not to mention indelible per-device flags apps can set to block scammers using the same device to make multiple accounts), and destroying it helps to maintain scarcity and keep prices up.
Macs don't get viruses!
I hope you're being sarcastic.
It wasn't about that, but more about physical cleansing after every use. 🤭
Physical cleaning also helps prevent the spread of viruses!
Yesss
They've been doing it for businesses for decades so this isn't really surprising honestly
You'll own nothing!
Disgusting
This actually makes some sense, since I'm genuinely interested in 1.5TB of integrated ram and what you can do with it, but don't really want to shell out the 30k it will cost.
30k?!? It would be more like 50. I was lucky enough to get three 512gb Mac Studios for work and they were over 10k each. And this was before RAM went through the roof.
[2028] Apple announces that they will no longer sell phones to consumers, only rent them. "Our customers love the ease of monthly rental payments that never stop and we listened!" said one Apple exec.
I 100000% know this will come true. Its not even a joke.
While there are still cheaper DDR5 options at lower speeds, the 32GB of DDR5 @ 8000MT I bought at $579 in February is now $700 on Amazon and even more elsewhere.
At the time I was convinced that the industry was moving towards a full-leasing only model, and so I decided to invest in some future proofing. It took less than 6 months for the price to start jumping again. Whether this is deliberate, or simply an emergent quality of supply/demand of the new AI economy probably doesn’t matter. The bar for private compute power is being shoved higher and higher by data centers and the PC industry’s response is to move towards a leasing model.
I foresee that eventually that when PC hardware becomes too expensive or completely unavailable in consumer markets, your PC will become like your phone - a locked-down, remotely managed, integrated hardware system that you lease as a unit, along with a cloud services subscription. Or, a thin client with the bare minimum specs to accommodate cloud computing. Extrapolating from this - a privatized Internet hostile to client computers unauthenticated by a major company or government entity running a recognized digital fiefdom where uncontrolled local compute will be viewed as highly suspicious.
If you still have the means and the interest, I suggest investing in consumer PC hardware to:
Demonstrate this market is still viable.
Buy hardware before it jumps in price again.
Claw back some of the local compute power being engineered away from consumers.
Of course, the AI economic bubble is due for collapse and cheap hardware may suddenly flood the market in a few years. However, I’m betting there is enough runway and monetization left to fund the pathway to the end of common PC ownership.
Both...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsung-sk-hynix-and-micron-sued-over-alleged-dram-price-fixing-amid-record-memory-costs
The handful of companies that can make ram realized that as long as they all go full in on AI, no one else can make consumer ram without spending tens of billions of dollars on fabrication sites
So the less they make, the more profit per unit. If any one of them started making more, we wouldn't have the price crunch and they'd all have to make more to justify keeping production running, further reducing price.
That makes at home computing cheaper, pulling people away from various cloud infrastructure they want to keep afloat because that's where the high priced chips go.
It's all a house of cards to shove data centers down our throats, because that's where the profit is in the moment.
End datecenter, and ram prices plummet
I feel like it's been like this for a long time now.
Uh-oh
Lol, no
Exploit, not defeat.
Car companies started "leasing" cars at the very beginning of starting to charge way too much for their assembly-line products. Will the government eventually give apple some of that hot "bail out" money in the future?
If you shop around and plan to only own a car 2-3 years you can pay significantly less but it’s definitely uncommon. I currently lease an R1T (Rivian truck) for about half the monthly cost of purchasing it and my three year lease is up this December and I won’t be leasing it again,I had zero interest in purchasing a first gen electric so it worked out for me. Leasing isn’t inherently bad but it’s often exploited by companies and used exactly as you described.
wtf
knew this was coming. it's Apple's MO since...like....ever since the company started. Let someone else do it first and then try to do it better. HP is already doing this, Apple is going to "improve it".
You will own nothing... and then you will realize you have nothing to lose. try realizing that sooner than later.
People lease apartments, houses, cars, appliances, games, why not crapples?
The only reason I would do this would be to compile iOS apps, because I am not buying an iMac just for that. Except there's already services out there that offer the solution, plus I can also access other hardware too.
Or you could buy it using BestBuy financing. Or just buy the one you can afford.
Best Buy financing is pretty sick, 0% for 24 mos on high-dollar items. I bought a ~14-year-old house that still had the original washer and dryer in it and immediately replaced them with brand new, warrantied ones in a way that didn't force me to pay extra to some do-nothing rent-taker and that I didn't even feel the hit financially. Promotional shit like that feels scammy sometimes, but it definitely has its place if you use it judiciously.
Hold on, aren't MAC users leasing already? Once they stop updates to any one MAC, that's that for the computer 'you bought and paid for'. So, they are changing the terminology and calling it a 'business model'?
They're past the "make people comfortable with the strategy" phase. Now they're getting you to swallow the Flavor-ade
What?
Uhh people are financing their weekly groceries now, dumb as this is I am not exactly stressing it, being able to lease cars didn't take away cars from the rest of us.
"Fuck you, I got mine" attitude.
You don't see a problem with what you said? And since you don't FUCK YOU.
Wait, don't new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?
Yes, you are missing something. You are assuming they get their memory from a different supplier than the rest of the industry.
For some reason lots of people assume this.
My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it's not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple's RAM is making it specifically for them.
Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.
Afaik they use the same type of memory as phones do, variants of LPDDRx. "Unified" does not denote a different type, it means that both the GPU and the CPU can use the same memory (similarly to integrated GPUs using the main system ram).
Thanks for the clarification, I thought I had read somewhere that they were doing something special in terms of their specs but maybe that was wrong (or maybe they transitioned at some point to save money)
I see. Yeah, I think the problem is that they can’t insulate themselves from the overall production timeline constraints. Because even if their chips are unique, they don’t have their own private production lines. They only get a share of available production capacity.
And as I understand it. Buying out a memory production facility is something they are not interested in. They don’t want to be in that part of the supply chain. And getting in now, only for memory supply chain constraints to go back to “normal” in 2 years isn’t a strategy they want to take.
Apple would rather have a diverse supply chain, and have the ability to pit different vendors against each other.
Some of this is similar to why just building a new facility isn’t a solution in the near term either. Because by the time it’s online, the situation is likely to have passed. And then you are back in a commodity market that’s historically difficult to compete in.
Glad I scooped up an M4 Mac Mini earlier this year before all this RAM shortage. Say what you will about Apple, but their M chips are great. Leasing a laptop though? Yeah, no.
So Apple fanatics trade in their iPhone for the newest one every year. Does Apple executives think that maybe they can get folks to do the same on their laptop?
I don't get the general criticism. It will all depend on details. If you can "rent" a $1000 device for $500 in payments over 2 years, and have the option to pay $500 at end of 2 years, or pay $250 over the next 2 years, then that is a better deal for you, including the delayed payments, and your optionality. If rampocalypse is over in 2 years, you can get a better device. How far away from the above formula implementation is matters though.
An advantage with buying a "good phone" is that Apple needs to keep their trade in incentives high to get you to upgrade later. Lease provides a clear upfront proposition instead of hoping for future Apple generosity.
To be fair, there are millions of Americans who upgrade their phones with their cell carrier every year. Technically this is a 2-year loan that will pay off the device if you do nothing, or give you the option to trade in the device after 1 year of payments in exchange for a new device. This pays off the original loan, assuming the device is in good working order.
The details matter here, but this is also very similar in the end result as a lease. You pay every month for an installment, get to use the latest and greatest hardware, and can trade it in for a new model. This model works very well for phones. Why not apply a similar principle to a laptop, but amortize the upfront cost over 4 or 5 years with the option to trade-in and upgrade after two years?
It’s interesting enough for businesses that it may be a great model. The amount of older e-waste laptops filling closets and IT departments is staggering.
Phones you can usually keep once you pay it off though. Once you conplete the plan for the laptop you have to return it or likely pay a lump payment (if im understanding this correctly)
I’d expect the laptops would work similarly, you can either pay longer and keep it or trade it in earlier.
The existence of the lump payment at the end reduces the monthly payment
You've been able to do this with Apple devices in my country for years through the retailer. Phone carriers used to do something similar
Who did not see it coming? That was the whole plan since long ago. This way or that, you are the target to squeeze
Who want to own that shit now when they announced they'll implement Israeli chips in the future versions!?
Wait for Motorola with Graphene OS, or get a Pixel and switch to Graphene.
My 2020 MacBook will probably last another 10 years, at that time I will have no issue buying a new base model even if it is 3x the price
temporary credit card then don’t pay after receiving the device and cancel the virtual card..? 99% off laptop
"How to land yourself in prison for fraud in one simple step..."
I should’ve added /s lol
Lol to apple fanboys. ThinkSubscription
If it works for Apple, Samsung and Google will be next in line to do the same. Enshittification is in no way limited to Apple.
I was more referring to people who refuse to use open source because they are locked into apple and think its good and "secure". Well, this is what they get.