Indeed. I used to be on the upgrade program so I could upgrade every year, but decided to skip the 16 and keep my 15 until the 17 came out.

Even if you are upgrading every single year, it works out roughly the same to just buy every phone outright and then trade in last year's model -- you typically get ~half your purchase price back as trade-in value after a year anyway.

Hey that's not fair, there has been one actually useful "innovation" -- switching to USB-C like the rest of the world has been using for 10 years. Literally nothing has made me feel the slightest craving for a new iPhone since getting my 15 Pro Max.

It's "just" a restructuring; the previous setup was a really bizarre financial product where Citizens Bank gave you a 24-month 0% personal loan to buy an iPhone, but Apple would also buy your phone and loan out and sell you a new one every 12 months.

Now it's just a normal lease product with a 0% money factor through Klarna, that also works across Apple.

What this does is gives Apple more "price flexibility" (aka, they can raise prices more easily, which was probably a lot of the driver for this), but also gives consumers more buying power flexibility since it's a simple product that works across the board rather than a bizarre iPhone specific optimized financial instrument.

The new Apple Upgrade is also 0%, but has lower monthly payments and a balloon payment at the end, like a typical lease. It's not just cost / 24mo.

legit could be your last phone ever, why upgrade?

I think "most people" have been shifting towards longer than 24-month replacement cycles. Leasing with a fixed end is probably predicted in their financial models to do a better job of getting more people onto a strict 24 month cycle. Nobody will want to actually buy out their lease on a 2-year-old phone, so they'll turn it in and lease another one, so Apple can throw it into the shredder[1] and show an additional sale on their books.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/94386/the-truth-about-apples-fre...

First-party MSRP at that. What's a few % free loan discount in comparison to almost any other retail pricing out there that is periodically 10-15% off.