Apple is reportedly working on selling iPhones and iPads themselves as part of a hardware subscription service, according to a new report from Bloomberg, whose author Mark Gurman writes the service could arrive next year.
The move would fit into Apple’s ongoing push towards subscription services as a whole. Over the past several 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 new revenue streams for the company. Many of those services have already been bundled together into the company’s Apple One bundles, too.
We’ve already seen a similar shift on the hardware front: Apple added a monthly subscription model for its AppleCare extended warranties back in 2019. And Apple has offered its iPhone Upgrade Program — which allows customers to pay for the combined cost of AppleCare 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.
h/t Google_It