The iPhone Upgrade Plan is a Game-Changer | Tech.pinions - Perspective, Insight, Analysis

Interesting times for carriers; check the full post for additional insights

"For Apple, this is a great arrangement because iPhone upgrades become much more predictable and it gains much greater visibility over future iPhone sales as a result. This should also help to stabilize Apple’s revenues from quarter to quarter, depending on how it ends up accounting for these leases. But more importantly, Apple now avoids the situation where an iPhone customer looking to upgrade wanders into a carrier store to check out new iPhones and winds up walking out with a new Samsung instead. Apple basically protects itself against the threat of competitive switching with these users, who will never even go into a carrier store in the first place.
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Even though the carriers have largely celebrated the end of subsidies and the move to installment and leasing plans, it’s quite possible the carriers have opened the door to a trend that may well come back to bite them. They’ve both weaned customers off subsidies and trained them to buy their devices outright in monthly installments and, in the process, they’ve played right into Apple’s hands. They might well rue the day they embraced the move away from subsidies."

The iPhone Upgrade Plan is a Game-Changer | Tech.pinions - Perspective, Insight, Analysis