In 2026, life feels like one big rental. Music: rented. Films: rented. TV: rented. Media and software has quietly shifted from something you bought once to something that diligently empties your bank account every month. And now, Apple is giving hardware the same treatment.
The company launched a new upgrade programme last month, letting users ‘lease’ their new iPhone or Mac through ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ service Klarna. In a world where we seem to own fewer and fewer of the products we use, Apple’s decision to reinvent itself, as Apple leaker Mark Gorman puts it, as the “world’s biggest subscription provider”, feels a little depressing.
We're living through the age of access instead of ownership. Sure, subscriptions can make sense. They're convenient and spread costs. Using Spotify is easier than lugging around a CD wallet. But there's a cultural cost that rarely gets mentioned. Stop paying for a subscription, and that carefully curated music or film collection is liable to evaporate. And if Ryan Gosling’s hand has shown us anything, it’s that even when you are paying for something, it could change at any moment.
Apple has been embracing this world for a long time now. From Music to TV to News to Games, the company has turned everything into a subscription, with varying degrees of success (Apple Arcade probably doesn’t have Sony worried). Even the company’s creative software is leaning into the Adobe model.
But while the company’s obsession with subscriptions isn’t new, the fact Apple wants to make them so integral to its offering, extending to hardware, seems alarming. At worst, it runs against everything that made the company iconic in the first place.
This is a company that was built on objects and design. Apple’s hardware and software were already seamlessly interlinked. And the result was tech devices, like the iPod and iMac, that people genuinely wanted to own. And that cultural capital lives on today, particularly in the case of the iPod, which is enjoying a surge of popularity. Is it a coincidence that people are looking to embrace a simple mp3 player when streaming is reaching its peak? I doubt it.
Subscriptions are never going to inspire any kind of affection. Nobody gets nostalgic about a monthly bill. There’s a sad irony to a company famed for making products we want to own so wholeheartedly embracing a world in which we don’t own anything.
