Comment by sneak

> I get that people who are going to upgrade to the latest flagship phone every 18-24 months will probably do better with this, but realistically... those people are fucking insanely financially irresponsible

This is not remotely true. I buy each and every flagship iPhone every year on or near release day for cash. I have done so every release since the first iPhone came out.

Each September or October my old phone goes into a desk drawer forever, or is wiped and gifted to a partner or close friend. I do not recover any of the costs at the end of the 12 months.

In total, it is way less than $200 per month. That’s not “fucking insanely financially irresponsible” by any stretch of the imagination. $2k per year is a trivial amount of money for the most-often-used computer in my entire life. It pays for itself in the first few weeks of the year.

Separately, I spend another 10-20k per year on computer software and services, because it assists my business in making many times that in revenue. Hell, even my hobby AWS S3 account is like $35/mo and that’s like the same as the lease payment for the flagship iPhone Pro under this program.

Upgrading each year brings real performance benefits, despite your claim that phones don’t materially improve each generation. Whether or not that is worth replacing it before it breaks or not is a separate conversation, but let’s not pretend that upgrading annually is exactly equivalent to lighting $2k on fire. Anyone who participates regularly in US “bar culture”, for example, is spending more each month on drinks than I spend to carry the latest flagship iPhone, and nobody is claiming that eating out three times a month or going to the bar with your buddies every Friday night is “fucking insanely financially irresponsible”. Tech is so cheap now that it’s a trivial amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

(You’ll probably flip when you hear I replace my $7k work laptop every 12-24 months, too.)

Furthermore, I’m not even an extreme outlier. I know people who regularly buy the flagship iPhone for their entire family, in cash, every year. It’s a bit spendy if you’re not using it for business (but who isn’t, in 2026, where every single thing you do is an app) but it’s still simply not that much money in real terms when you consider it’s well under $2k/year/device. Hell, a nice lunch for two people at a decent restaurant even without alcohol is pushing $100 in most cities.