iPhone with hardware subscription: Apple reportedly abandons plans for new sales model

Customers are increasingly keeping their smartphones for longer, and Apple had allegedly planned to circumvent this trend and boost its own sales with a subscription model. Rumors have been circulating since 2022 about such a subscription model in which customers can only keep their iPhone for as long as they pay the monthly fee. The advantage for the customer would be that they would receive a new iPhone every year, while Apple would achieve higher sales on average than selling customers a new smartphone every three to four years.

Apple is said to have now abandoned these subscription plans, as Bloomberg recently learned from its sources. This change of plan is said to be primarily due to the fact that the strategy surrounding Apple Pay has changed and the payment service will no longer offer the option of paying for products at a later date or in several installments. According to Bloomberg, the fact that this hardware subscription did not come onto the market years ago is due to problems with regulatory approvals and software errors that have not yet been corrected.

Apple is also said to have had concerns that this subscription model would compete too strongly with subsidized smartphones from network operators and with its own iPhone Upgrade Program, in which iPhone buyers in the US can effectively pay for their smartphone in 24 monthly instalments, with customers being able to upgrade to a new iPhone after twelve months. Currently, Apple is said to have no plans for hardware subscriptions, while installment payment options will be handled by partners such as Klarna in the future.