Is Apple’s New Hardware Subscription A Sign Of Things To Come?

Going a step beyond the rumours…

Apple has been proven time and time again to be the source of juicy rumours that just keep on giving. For many tech writers, this is definitely good news. For the rest of the world it’s either fatigue-inducing, desensitising or just downright confusing.

I fall into a small niche of both user and tech writer who likes to look beyond the immediate information and how it might connect to the rest of the world, be that parallel events, history, politics, etc. I am a firm believer that things don’t happen in a vacuum, and Apple’s rumoured hardware subscription model undoubtedly feel like one of those that could have a major impact on how we perceive modern society and ownership.

The rumour claims that Apple might launch a hardware as a service model, similarly to how iCloud accounts, Apple TV+ or Apple Music subscriptions work at the moment. While news outlets and YouTubers jumped on this pretending it’s the juiciest of stories since the last #appleGate, the truth is a bit different. Hardware “subscription” is nothing new. It’s been around for decades, and even Apple themselves have been doing this for a good while (years).

The more accurate term for hardware subscription is leasing, and leasing has been around for decades.

I remember the first time cars started to sold as “leased” in Eastern Europe. The concept of it was highly unusual at first, but it became incredibly popular because it meant regular folks suddenly found themselves able to afford imported cars from the West. Leasing wasn’t only a much cheaper route to “ownership”, but came with certain perks like car upgrade, insurance, repairs, etc. This wasn’t really ownership, though. It was essentially access to the vehicle for an extended period of time without the annoying oversight and fuckedupery of say car rental companies we all hate from the deepest corners of our livers. For all intents and purposes, it was your car to use as long as you paid the lease.

Of course, most folks out there look at cars, then look at a mobile phone and don’t necessarily see the connection as both being hardware. They are, though. One has wheels and takes you places, the other has no wheels but connects you to people you don’t even know and harvests your habits for Lord Zuckerberg. Sure, one of them is big, the other is small, but they’re both tools at the end of the day, and size doesn’t always matter. Heck, many Apple products cost more than a car!

And on that note, Apple is no stranger to leasing hardware. This might be news to some, but many businesses don’t actually own the hardware they give to employees or have in the office. For instance, I worked in a company where every single Apple product was leased. When the company folded, it was as easy as stopping paying the lease and returning the devices to Apple. This model, of course, is not available to the average Joe, it’s a business-to-business arrangement, but the precedent is certainly there, it only comes down to how Apple would scale the same setup to all customers, including you and me.

Is it a good idea, though?

Well, if consumerism taught us, anything is that giving people new shiny things early and often is something that’s pretty easy to sell. Additionally, it’s also a solid lock-in strategy, especially if that subscription comes with all the bells and whistles of a new model every year, all of Apple’s software subscriptions bundled in, perhaps even paired with an Apple credit card. Throw in Apple Car too, and it’s a pretty neat little ecosystem that getting out of is more hassle than most would want to even contemplate.

I think, the hardware subscription model goes beyond Apple.

Before I get into the details of why I think this is, let me make something clear. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t like jumping to conclusions, and I don’t get any of my information from social media. With that out of the way, we all heard of the World Economic Forum, and some have also talked at length about the so-called “Great Reset”.

Now, hold that thought for a second, because another thing you might have heard of is the Right to Repair movement. Finally, one thing you might have not heard of is Jacque Fresco, a futurist, inventor and social architect. Let’s look at all three in a bit a more detail.

• The World Economic Forum, and it’s Great Reset strategy, among others, proposes a society in which people’s sense of ownership gets redefined to the point where nobody really owns anything. Products, one-by-one, become perpetual services that everyone rents/leases/subscribes to as and when as needed.
• The Right to Repair movement suggests that hardware devices people own should be repairable by their owners or their designated proxies at the owner’s will. Making a hardware product subscription-based removes this requirement, as the product would not need to be owner-repairable, as the concept of owner would exist no more.
• Jacque Fresco in his Venus project proposed a lot of highly innovative resets to modern society. One of these was removing the need to own things. Say, for instance, you needed a bike for a day, you’d just pick one up and use it for the day. Same with a car, a camera, a laptop, virtually anything you’d use you’d be subscribing to for shorter or longer periods of time.

While Jacque Fresco might very much been ahead of his time, I think many of his ideas are starting to organically resurface in various forms across the world. Some come from a good place, others not so much, but the question is still valid.

Is the concept of ownership ultimately ruining the planet, and the very fabric of our society?

The trouble with posing this question is that most of us will inevitably and quite instantly think of communism and fascism, neither of which have been proven to work as political systems. But that’s just it. The alternative way of implementing non-ownership across the board is an economic one, driven by consumerism. It worked with property, cars, movies, music, tech in the business space.

Right to repair will eventually fail, not because it doesn’t have merit, but rather because people will subscribe to more and more hardware instead, hardware itself will get more and more miniaturised and consequently unrepairable (though recyclable).

Companies will increasingly prefer to lend you out anything and everything you can think of, apart from your underwear perhaps, and political regimes will rely on this new era of closed-loop consumerism to fuel their high-level policies.

An entirely subscription-based world feels like a utopia, but then again, humans never gave up on utopias until they tried them out for a few decades.

After all, evolution dictates that we try out new things, often radically different to what we’re used to, and who’s to say this is or isn’t another step in our evolution?

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!