Apple is reportedly working on selling iPhones and iPads themselves as part of a hardware subscription service according to the latest report from Bloomberg whose author Mark Gurman writes the service could arrive next year. The move would fit into Apple’s ongoing push toward subscription services as a whole. Over the past many years apple has increasingly been emphasizing recurring subscriptions like apple music, apple TV plus, apple news plus, apple fitness plus, and apple arcade as key latest revenue streams for the agency. Many of those services have already been bundled tighter into the agency apple one bundles too. We’ve already seen a similar shift on the hardware front apple added a monthly subscription version for its apple care extended warranties back in 2019. And Apple has offered its iPhone upgrade program which allows customers to pay for the combined cost of apple care and an iPhone over 24 months and the option to trade in their device after 12 months of payments since 2015. Both those programs already resemble a hardware subscription in many ways. According to a Bloomberg report, the monthly charge wouldn’t simply be the price of the device divided by 12 or 24 months but rather be a still undecided monthly cost potentially with the choice to upgrade to the latest hardware as it’s released. And like Apple’s other subscriptions it would be tied to the user’s existing Apple ID account with the possibility of bundling in apple care or apple one services as well.
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