Subscriptions were supposed to replace cable, then software, then heated seats, now phones. Funny how every innovation somehow ends with paying forever. If your business model needs me renting hardware I already carry everywhere, maybe the product isn’t improving fast enough to justify buying it?
With smartphones current prices and componants becoming more expensive they are realizing not a lot of people will buy a smartphone costing more than 1500 dollars. Especially when hardware is now good enough and people are starting to try to keep their phone as long as possible.
Making you rent your phone allow to hide how much it’s going to cost you and ensure them a steady cash income.
This!
I buy one smartphone per decade. Why would I want to lease it instead?
Think of the recurring opportunity for emails about price increases and downstream shareholder value!
The only thing prompting phone replacement for me was battery life. And nearly all phones have shit ability to replace batteries (for now - EU rules incoming).
I bought a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS. I’ve left Big Tech behind. And I have a phone where I can easily replace the components. I don’t want to swap devices for 4-5 years, which makes ownership far more cost effective than leasing.
Also – with leasing, what happens when the renter is done with it? E waste, just like we have today.
Biggest issue is software support. You really do not want to run your banking app on an older, unpatched Android version
Oneplus 13 has two day battery life for me. Best phone I’ve ever owned. But I heard they are not going to release oneplus phones in Europe anymore so that sucks a lot. I dont want anything else.
No they just sell the devices to the secondary market
Absolutely fucking not. Im not going to lease something that contains my private information ever.
You will own nothing and like it
If you cannot control the software on the device — including the OS — then you never bought it. You paid for it, but you did not buy it and therefore do not own it.
I waited 8 year to get a newer phoner that was better than my previous phone in all respects at the same price. And even then it was mostly a convenience upgrade because my old phone was still working well.
Why the hell would it be worth it to lease a phone?
It depends a lot on how heavily you use your phones. I’m a heavy user and my batteries degrade heavily in 2-3 years. That leads to overheating, poor performance, and of course poor battery life.
The cost of replacing a battery is high for most phones. Sometimes higher than buying a new phone at a similar level of performance.
I’m doing 1-2 battery cycles per day. A light user might go through battery cycles at a quarter of my rate, and would not have those problems.
Right to repair solves that, by mandating against designs which make simple replacements exorbitantly expensive for no good reason.
Maybe we just need more affordable phones.
There were lots of affordable phones before the AI companies bought up all of the RAM and flash.
I wrote this comment on a $150 phone which for all the purposes that I use it for, performs exactly as well as an $800 iPhone.
I bought my Samsung for $240 CAD, brand new, not refurbished.
I can’t tell the difference from an expensive phone. Less camera lens? I don’t understand why other phones are $1000 to $2000. Processor speed? On a phone? I’m not running games on this thing except online chess. It plays YouTube without ads. It makes calls and sends texts.
I just don’t get it.
Past $800, you’re not getting a better processor. The base iPhone and Galaxy offer the same chip as the Pro Max and Ultra, respectively, in most generations.
You’re only getting more cameras or screen. The $2000 ones fold.
Thata why apple made their new cheap MacBook out of some phone processors but wont let us have a dual OS on the phone if we plug it into a monitor. Because its powerful enough to do that, but we wont buy both if we can.
Never do that. You should always fully own and control your communication and computation devices. It’s a matter of privacy.
Even if you buy an iPhone outright you don’t fully control it.
That’s why I don’t buy Apple products…
I will not rent critical items.
There has been a large push to enter a subscription for eyeglasses, the large firms here keep pushing and pushing to rent glasses.
Fuck no, I refuse to have my eyesight be dependent on having to keep paying.
Same for music, I buy all my music through iTunes, I have never used Spotify, I refuse to be put in a situation where I am in financial trouble and I loose access to my music.
This is the same crap, I need a phone to be an active member of modern society, I will not rent that access.
Wait, sorry, a subscription for GLASSES!? They’re like $150 here if you want the name-brand ones, or covered by insurance if you don’t. Insurance is basic btw, $80 a month for a family of 4 for ‘basic extras’. I don’t know which country you live in, but I can take a wild guess.
In America you can have whatever the top tier of vision insurance is available to you and it’s basically a $100 off coupon for frames. I’ve never not spent $300-$400 for glasses.
Yeah, both our largest optician chains, Synsam and Synoptik, as well as others, are pushing subscriptions, hard.
Now, I am fortunate enough that I can afford to buy name brand glasses with the best lenses on the market, two pairs (one normal, one sunnies) cost me about €1500, but there are far cheaper alternatives.
All companies see there are more profits to be made if you let consumers pay your company monthly instead of once, while you do not let them own anything. It is disgusting.
Did you pay your rent yesterday?
Yeah, because these companies buy up all houses while there’s a housing shortage, so I can’t afford buying one myself as the market is fucked. So I’m forced into subscription.
They want a future in which only they own property, and everyone else has to rent even the freaking air.
If your current plan is to buy the latest and greatest phone today, sell it in two years, and then buy a new top of the line phone, then Apple’s new lease program looks like an attractive option. They’ve priced it such that, over the course of the lease, you end up paying about the cost of purchasing the phone minus its resale value. Leasing looks convenient because it saves you from having to find a buyer.
It also keeps phones out of the secondary market, which benefits Apple. Off lease phones are used for warranty replacements, or sold as refurbished through official storefronts instead of person to person.
Once Apple’s leasing program kills off a competing used phone market, they can also raise the cost of the lease to reflect that, which also benefits Apple over the longer term.
Apple would be stupid not to try leasing their phones.
There’s always going to be a robust used market for phones that were purchased outright, to be resold on a different cycle than every 2 years (plenty of rich people changing phones every year, and plenty of people replacing on a 3, 4, 5, or 6 year cycle). You can expect the market to basically settle on a curve where it depreciates along a predictable rate.
Leases don’t really change that, any more than leases changed the market for used cars, or even certified pre-owned by the same dealers and organized by the same manufacturers who sell new cars.
There will be times that the predefined lease terms will unexpectedly prove to be either beneficial or detrimental to the consumer. Sometimes external factors will affect the entire used market, like currency issues, or component pricing issues (imagine if RAM prices dramatically swing again for new devices in a way that affects the value of the already-sold devices out in the world), where the predefined lease prices turn into a windfall for someone. Like in 2021 or so when expiring car leases allows the lessee to buy out the car at the end of the lease for much cheaper than the car itself was worth.
It’s generally going to be a less than ideal financial decision to lease, but it also won’t collapse the used device market and it won’t be that far off the practice of selling your old phone when you buy a new one.
Yeah I generally switch every 5 years or so, and my old phone generally just rots away in a drawer. Leasing might actually make sense for use cases like mine (or not, I haven’t looked at the numbers). Might also give me less anxiety about accidentally scratching the thing.
“The intent is that the user will turn in their device every 12 to 36 months because they intend to upgrade regardless.”
No, I get a new device because I’ve broken the last one. The ones I give back, you can’t sell on the secondary market which is their intent.
