Leasing your iPhone, the new China problem, & Apple's future on the AppleInsider Podcast

**William Gallagher** (0:00)
Apple smashed it with another record-breaking earnings report, don't they always? But will they always? Does it actually need the new Apple upgrade if it's to continue doing this next time?
Hello, welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm William Gallagher. Our sponsor this time is Claude by Anthropic, and I'm joined as ever in this earnings week by Wesley Hilliard. Now, where's normally earnings? It's like I just said, well, it's great or it's bad, and it's never bad. What are you going to do? Apple earns some more money. But this time, the biggest news of the week, I think, has been all financial stuff. The changes to AppleCare 1 Well, excuse me, America's had AppleCare 1 for a year. We in the UK are now getting it, so is France, Germany and Australia. Then of course, it's the possibly great Apple upgrade, which we're not getting anywhere except in the US.
Listen, you're one of the people affected by this because you were already on the iPhone upgrade program. Does that mean you will now just segue straight over?

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:09)
So I've been looking into this and I listened to our episode last week again, just to check and of course, we talked about the rumor. Now we have the details. I think it's interesting how they're approaching this. I talked to Apple a little bit about how this is gonna work to make sure we got the details right. So it's gonna be interesting. So bigger picture, I think it's still worth saying that I don't think it's the end of the world that Apple offers financing options for its products, especially since many of them are very expensive.
The rates are fair because they're interest free. It's zero percent.

**William Gallagher** (1:48)
Yeah, didn't expect that.

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:50)
As long as you qualify through Klarna, you can get this interest free. Basically, you're gonna pay some amount of money, not MSRP, for your length of your lease. And when the lease is over, you will be eligible to return that item for a new product just like iPhone Upgrade program. You have to renew your lease, so therefore you're applying again. It's a soft credit pool every single time.
You should, as long as nothing catastrophic has happened to your credit, you should be good to go again. You will be put into a similar payment plan. The only way your prices go up per month is if the price of the new device is more than the old device, because it is all calculated based on MSRP.
At the end of your contract, if you choose to purchase the device instead of continuing your leasing option, you will go into a six month period where you have to pay off the remaining MSRP balance. So basically, if you paid $599 for your $1,100 iPhone for 12 months, you still owe $500 or so. And that $500 then needs to be paid off in monthly payments within the next six months. And at the end of that six month post period, you have to ensure your balance is completely totaled out. And then, and only then will you own that device. So it would still be MSRP, there's no fees involved. The only time you're paying more money than MSRP is if you try to cancel the lease early. And then you're going to get a contract termination fee of an unknown amount.

**William Gallagher** (3:38)
But the first time you said MSRP, it took me a beat to remember what that is. Manufacturers suggested retail price, but that also brings up something else in my mind, which is the money you're going to pay is what Apple charges. And Apple never charges less than the maximum for it. So straight, you know, how much money would it cost me to get X?
You could well save money going to Amazon or maybe a carrier or something like that.

**Wesley Hilliard** (4:06)
I mean, the difference being, yeah, I mean, there's this is where it's getting tricky. Apple is not the best option. I think it's going to be the most straightforward, easiest. It's built into Apple Pay, the Apple Store.
I went through a checkout process. I didn't check out. But you basically get to check out and you choose your payment method. It didn't let me choose Apple Pay. Funny enough, I would have to enter my Apple card details manually. I don't think this gets you your 3% back. I think this would actually get you only 1% back because you're using the card number at checkout. I don't know if that was a blip due to how I was doing it or if that will change later.