It might be revealed at the Far Out event, according to Mark Gurman.
Apple will introduce new iPhones on Wednesday, but the Far Out event may also witness the introduction of a new method for purchasing and selling the company’s smartphones.
A preview of Apple’s event on September 7 has been provided by Mark Gurman, a leaker with a sizable following and a respectable track record of foresight. Near the end, Gurman subtly mentions the company’s expected hardware subscription service. We already have a general understanding of how this would function from when Gurman first predicted it back in the spring, so there aren’t many new details in the piece.
Customers will receive a new iPhone and probably a variety of bundled services, like Apple TV+ or more iCloud storage, in exchange for paying a monthly membership charge. It’s unclear how much more expensive this would be with the handset included, but Gurman claims it will be linked to Apple One, the company’s services bundle.
Gurman anticipated that the subscription service would try to undercut the current iPhone Upgrade Program, which starts at $35.33 a month, back in the spring. While emphasising that these were “clearly just back-of-the-envelope arithmetic,” he suggested monthly payments of $35, $45 and $50 for the most recent iPhones in regular, Pro, and Pro Max spec.
However, if Apple One services are included, it suggests a higher price. After all, the current top tier, Apple One Premier, costs $29.95 a month on its own. Although logic would dictate that if you’re receiving everything, the price should be much north of $50, Apple may try to cut the headline price by merely include a select subset of the services in a subscription.
Regardless of the pricing strategy Apple chooses, plan on spending more money overall while owning the phone than the retail price. There will be discounts on the bundled services—you can now save $20 a month by subscribing to Apple One Premier—but Apple is always more generous with software or entertainment goods that have a fixed cost to the corporation than ones where it has to worry about per-unit margins.
Gurman stops short of saying that the subscription service, which might theoretically be called iPhone+, will be unveiled during the Far Out event. Instead, he hedges his bets and states, “As of now, I have no reason to assume that [it] won’t happen by the end of the year.” Furthermore, everyone is aware that the iPhone 14 debut won’t be the only Apple event in 2022, and it may not even be the most exciting.
However, it would be much more logical to introduce a new iPhone payment system at an iPhone event as opposed to one that emphasises Macs and iPads.
