Apple will reportedly sell the iPhone as a subscription service

$Apple(AAPL.US)$ It’s hard to imagine that Apple will simply be lending out devices on a monthly basis — will you really be able to just pay to “subscribe” an iPhone for a single month, like you can for Apple TV Plus to binge a season of Ted Lasso? Similarly, a world where Apple has customers invest months of capital to rent a device only to have them return it at the end of the process seems equally unlikely.
It’s possible that Apple is simply looking to cut out the middleman and expand its installment-based payment offerings to other products. The iPhone Upgrade Program effectively has customers take out an interest-free loan with Citizens One, which they then repay over the course of the 24-month plan. Apple also allows Apple Card customers to pay for Apple products over monthly installments without paying interest, but that too is only limited to a small subset of Apple customers. An Apple-based subscription service could eliminate those requirements, and allow Apple to expand it to other hardware products (like the iPad or its Mac computers) too.
But while details are still slim, one thing is clear: Apple’s subscription ambitions are still only just getting started.