New Apple products now available as a lease with upgrade. Just convenient, or is there more to it?
ASKED BY · Oliver Breidenbach · 11 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:12:30
Apple's lease-to-upgrade model responds to higher memory costs; carriers have offered similar installment plans for years, but the buyout terms at lease end need scrutiny.
The lease model ensures a steady upgrade cycle and customer base; the economics can favor leasing over purchase in some cases, like a $250 savings over two years for an Apple Watch.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
12:12this duo is an $800 Delta at every single storage level. So the question that I'm asking is, is that $800 worth not having to lug around this? Perhaps. I'm really excited to see what people are going to build for it and in the age of code being cheap with the help of our AI assistants, this could be the time where people are a little more free to play because they
12:42don't have to, it's not as much of a gamble of their time and energy resources to get there in the first place. Next question. All right, this one's coming in from Oliver Breidenbach and Oliver asks, new Apple products now available as a lease with upgrade. Just convenient, or is there more to it? Courtney. Well, I think this is Apple's answer to the fact that because of the memory shortage,
13:08everything's going to become $200 to $300 more expensive if you're going to put any kind of RAM in it. As far as the phones go, of course, carriers have been offering these kind of deals, where you're paying for the phone over a two-year contract period for decades now since the iPhone was introduced, the first one with AT&T. You were paying for that phone in installments.
13:33But now they're offering this lease-to-upgrade payment plan where in addition to your – you can pay a monthly fee. In addition to anything that has a cellular chip in it like the iPad or the iPhones, you're going to be paying that along with your contract for your monthly fees for connectivity. So it's not really that much new at the end of the term.
14:00I wonder if, you know, the problem is, you know, what the carriers used to do is keep charging you that inflated monthly rate even after they've long paid for the phone, you know, paid back the cost of the phone. and they're reaping in much bigger profits if you just continue the lease and continue to hold on to it at a monthly rate.
14:22At the end of the lease, I think there's a buyout period, a buyout offer where you offer to buy it out at whatever is left, although there should be nothing left, but I'm curious as to what that buyout covers and how much extra it's going to cost for you to own the phone at the end of the lease period. So be curious to see what that is.
14:43Yeah, it's interesting. They're even extending this to things like the watch. So I was running the numbers and I'm when I was I've pretty much for the last 10 years done an every other year thing for the watch. Like I'll buy the watch and then two, sometimes three years, I'll think about upgrading it. And then I've got if I don't have somebody to give that watch to as a hand me down,
15:09it just sits and doesn't do anything. So in a weird way, I don't know if this is Apple making sure that, is this Apple making sure that they're continuing to get new products out because people are on this upgrade train? Like if people are on the lease program, they're going to get the new thing. And so there's a built-in customer base there.
15:30Oddly, I did the watch with, I wanted the ceramic one. and it would have been like a thousand dollars for the watch new and then I did the 24 month lease thing because that's how long I was going to have the watch anyway and then it was like $30 a month I did the math and it's like okay so the lease over two years was $250 cheaper than
15:57just buying the thing outright are they trying to make me are they trying to make me lease it And then at the end of the two years, if I wanted to keep it at that point, does that mean it's like, okay, you're either going to upgrade to the new one or spend $250 if you want to keep it? I'll be very curious in, I guess, 2028 to see what is it like at the end of that because I've never tried that before.
16:23So, you know, I didn't need to lease it, but I probably didn't even need a new watch. But at this point, it's a small enough thing that I'm like, okay, why not? Like, let's just try it. Courtney? Yeah, one thing I forgot to mention too is the prestige factor because there are those in the Apple cult that always want to show everybody that, hey, I have money to burn.
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