Never Own an iPhone Again

My main phone is an iPhone 12 Pro, which I bought in 2020. It still has the original battery, which is finally degrading enough for me to notice. It still gets iOS updates. It just doesn't have all the features in it — Apple Intelligence being the obvious one —but six years in, the phone works. I used to buy new iPhones every year, but now I hold off as long as I can. Many people are doing the same, and Apple is creatively trying to get us back quicker.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Apple is launching Apple Upgrade, a leasing program backed by Klarna, on July 28th. It covers most iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches. iPhone and Watch leases run 24 months; Mac and iPad leases run 36. After 12 payments, you can upgrade to the new model. At the end, you can keep the device, hand it back, or roll into the next one. AppleCare isn't included, which is a change from the existing iPhone Upgrade Program.

The reporting doesn't say whether leasing a device ends up costing more than buying one outright. I don't think that's the point.

The point is the payment, not the price.

The benefit to Apple isn't margin on any single phone. It's that the payment never stops.

Let me do the math on my own situation, because it's unkind. My 12 Pro was $1,099. I've had it for about 72 months. That works out to a little over $15 a month. Every month I don't buy a new phone, that number gets smaller, and Apple's revenue from me stays at zero.

Now put me on a lease. The monthly payment amount may not matter because most people never plan to keep the phone the entire lease period. Upgrade at month 12, as the program invites me to, and I've reset the clock before the device is even paid down. Do that on a loop, and I never stop paying, never own anything, and never have a month when Apple gets nothing from me. Over the same six years, that's not $999. It's several multiples of it.

It may genuinely cost less to own a particular iPhone this way. That's the pitch, and it might even be true. But you never own a particular iPhone. You own a payment.

People are keeping their phones.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, I used to buy a new iPhone every year. I did it because the phones were meaningfully different every year — the camera jump, the screen, the thing you could show someone. That stopped being true a while ago. The year-over-year updates are now minor enough that I've deferred the purchase six times in a row without much agony.

What's actually kept me on the 12 Pro isn't loyalty to it. It's that I'm waiting for the foldable. I want to see a real change in the shape of the thing before I spend again. And if the foldable turns out to be a disappointment, I'll probably buy an iPhone 18 Pro anyway, because the battery life of my current phone is causing significant frustration.

That's my upgrade trigger, and it's worth naming plainly: battery, or a new form factor. Not a new chip. Not a slightly better camera. My Apple Watch works the same way — I keep one for about six years, until the OS updates stop coming or the thing feels slow on new software. My iPad is older than either.

I don't think I'm unusual. Phones got good, and then they've been good for a long time. Leasing is what you build when your customers no longer need to upgrade annually, and you'd like them to anyway.

Who this is actually for

Two groups, I think. The people who already buy every year and now get to do it more smoothly — those people were never the problem, and Apple locks them in tighter. And the people who've looked at a $1,200 phone and quietly decided it isn't worth it anymore. For that second group, a monthly number does real work. A small monthly payment is a decision you make once. $1,200 is a decision you keep re-litigating in the store.

That's the group Apple wants, and honestly, that's a reasonable thing to want. Prices got high enough that people started doing arithmetic. This is a way to make the arithmetic feel smaller.

There is a price that would work on me. It'd just have to compete with fifteen dollars a month, which is what six years of not upgrading buys you. I don't think Apple wants to compete with that number. I think Apple would very much like everyone to stop calculating it.