Even Apple Doesn’t Want to Sell You
the iPhone Anymore.

Even Apple is done just selling you the box

According to code found in the iOS 27 beta and reported by 9to5Mac, Apple is building an official leasing programme — nicknamed “Apple Upgrade” — covering most iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch models, on terms of roughly 12 to 36 months, financed in partnership with Klarna. Nothing is officially announced, so treat the details as reported rather than confirmed. But the shape is unmistakable.

The part that made people sit up is the enforcement. The same code describes a Restricted Mode: miss your payments and the financing provider can remotely block most apps on the device. Phone, Wallet, Settings, Health and a few essentials keep working; the rest goes dark until you pay. There’s also a Partner Finance Lock that stops a delinquent device from being wiped or resold. In plain terms: you hold the phone, Apple holds the switch.

You can debate the consumer-rights side of that — and it deserves debate. But step back from the outrage and look at what it signals. The company that turned selling hardware into the most profitable business in history is quietly building the machinery to stop selling it and rent it instead. Companies don’t build that machinery for fun. They build it because the maths changed.

Why the seller suddenly wants to rent

The lazy read is “recurring revenue, obviously.” True, but incomplete. The deeper reason is the one from my last piece, seen from the other side of the counter.

Apple knows better than anyone how fast its own hardware flips. It is reportedly skipping the M5 chip entirely for its next Macs and rushing the M7 — compressing its own upgrade cycle. When your product is economically stale in twelve to eighteen months, selling it outright means you hand the customer a depreciating asset and then have to convince them to throw it away and buy the next one. Rent inverts that. The customer never owns the depreciating thing; they rent access to “current,” and you roll them onto the next generation automatically. The vendor stops selling a melting asset and starts selling a subscription to always-fresh.

That’s why the switch matters to them. In a rental model the asset stays theirs, so they need control over it — to reclaim it, restrict it, stop it being stripped for parts. The kill switch isn’t a bug in the plan. It is the plan. It’s what makes renting a fast-depreciating asset safe for the one who still owns it.

The real reason: the accounting can’t keep up

Here is the point I keep coming back to, and the one you asked me to make plainly. Traditional accounting cannot price a product that flips this fast.

Depreciation exists to spread an asset’s cost across its useful life. A laptop, a server, a machine — the books assume three to five years, and for most of business history that roughly matched reality. But tech hardware no longer obsoletes on that clock. It obsoletes economically in twelve to eighteen months while the accounting still depreciates it over five. The schedule describes a world that no longer exists.

When an asset’s economic life is a third of its accounting life, ownership is mispriced by the ledger itself. The balance sheet says you own something worth X; the market says it’s worth a fraction of X, and falling. Traditional accounting has no clean way to capture that flip — and so, quietly, the market routes around it. Rent is that route. A monthly rental re-prices the asset every single month at what it’s actually worth right now, instead of pretending, on a five-year straight line, that it’s still worth most of what you paid. Rent is honest about depreciation in a way ownership on the books simply isn’t.

So I agree with where this is going: rent is becoming the default business model for tech products — not because customers demand it, but because it’s the only structure that tells the truth about how fast the thing is losing value.

Everyone is racing everyone

And the flip is accelerating, because every hardware supplier is now sprinting against the others. AMD claims an 18× generational jump in cost-per-token. Apple skips whole chip generations to get ahead. NVIDIA answers annually now, not every two years. Nobody in this race can afford to slow down, so the cadence only compresses.

In a race that fast, owning the runner is the mistake. You don’t buy the sprinter mid-race; you rent a seat that always puts you on the current fastest one. That is the same logic whether you’re a consumer leasing an iPhone, a company renting cloud GPUs instead of buying a cluster, or a business paying for AI by the token instead of owning a model. The faster the field runs, the more ownership looks like betting your capital on a snapshot of a moving thing.

The catch: rent isn’t free — watch who holds the switch

I don’t want to sell rental as a clean win, because it isn’t. Apple’s kill switch is the honest warning label on the whole model. When you rent instead of own, three things shift to the vendor: control (they can restrict or reclaim the thing), continuity (miss a payment and it goes dark), and the open meter (you can pay forever and own nothing at the end). Subscriptions are famous for quietly billing you long after you’ve stopped getting value.

So the rule isn’t “rent everything.” It’s the same discipline as my hardware piece, one level up: rent the thing that flips fast, own the thing that’s stable and boring — and always know who holds the switch. Renting the fast-depreciating asset is smart. Renting your core capability from someone who can turn it off is a dependency you’d better have a fallback for. Both can be true, and the skill is telling them apart.

What this means for a Malaysian business

This isn’t an Apple story or a Silicon Valley story. The rental model is arriving at every layer, and most Malaysian businesses are about to meet it: software you already rent, hardware you’ll soon lease, and AI capability you’ll buy by the unit rather than build. We run on this ourselves — we sell AI generation by the credit, not by the machine, precisely because our customers shouldn’t be buying a depreciating capability outright any more than we should.

The businesses that win the next few years will price everything in rental terms and keep their optionality — short commitments, easy exits, no 36-month locks on things that obsolete in twelve. The ones that lose will keep signing multi-year purchases out of a habit formed in an era when things lasted, and keep defending those purchases long after the market has moved on.

The bottom line

When the greatest hardware seller in history starts building the tools to rent instead of sell, the argument is over. Ownership of fast-moving tech is becoming the exception, not the default — and the reason isn’t fashion, it’s that the books can no longer honestly value something that halves in worth before the depreciation schedule has finished its first year.

Published by IMA AI — July 2026. We sell AI capability by the credit, not the machine — because our customers shouldn’t own a depreciating asset any more than we should. This is a sequel to the US$100,000 I didn’t spend.