alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure I understand all the hate in this thread.
I had a friend who bought a new Mac every year, selling his old Mac. His calculation was that it was about the same price as keeping one Mac and upgrading every 5 years.
I'd consider leasing a Mac through this program. I priced one out, with the options I chose it's $8149, lease for $177 (6372 for 3yrs, 8496 for 4yrs).
Yes, at the end of those 3 years I don't have a mac, I have to keep paying, but I'd prefer a new Mac every 3yrs and it's just easier than trying to sell it for $1777. It doesn't seem like a bad deal to me, plenty of people lease cars. Plus, if you consider you can keep your moneny in interest earning account, then at 3% you'd end up with $2256
I'm not saying that makes it a good deal for you, but I personally like the idea of not paying out $8149 day one, especially for something I know has a shelf life. I'm on an 2021 M1 Mac. It works great. But I've also tried to run 70b LLMs and run out of memory (64g), so I think about upgrading to 128g which, being Apple, I can only do by buying a new mac.
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I don't see the point for consumers. Perhaps a minority will buy a new model every year but many people keep their devices for years to come.
Companies that require frequent hardware refreshes would benefit from this, though Apple already had has programs for those.
> I had a friend who bought a new Mac every year, selling his old Mac.
I considered that at one point, and it would have made sense based on prices alone, but it didn't work at all once I factored in having to pay sales tax on a brand-new Mac each year, and the cut eBay takes on a sale, and the fact that the eBay buyer also has to pay sales tax.
If I lived in a state with no sales tax, and could rely on selling locally with Facebook Marketplace or something, then I'd totally do it just for the infinite warranty coverage alone!
Still bugs me that states charge sales tax even on used items. It just seems wrong.