Mac Upgrade Program
In association with CIT as the financing partner, Apple has launched a new Mac Upgrade Program for small businesses and Apple business partners that allow companies to easily distribute and upgrade their fleets of MacBooks at an affordable price to all of their workers.
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The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are offered at $60 and $75 per month, respectively, while the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are offered at $30 and $39 monthly payments.
It seemed inevitable that Apple would offer Macs as a subscription service. Unlike the iPhone Upgrade Program, this is so far only for businesses.
As mentioned earlier, business customers can return or swap their Macs after three months. If you’re in a situation where you routinely upgrade your Mac every new release, this model might make a lot of sense from an accounting perspective. Depending on how you depreciate your laptops, simple financing options might help you write it off each month while getting a new upgrade whenever Apple releases new models. If you’d been using a 13″ MacBook Air with M1 for the last year, you’d have an easy path to upgrade to a 14″ or 16″ model without dealing with trade-ins or selling online.
CIT’s fine print says that the financing is 3% of the total cost, so as you add upgrades to your Mac, the monthly cost would change slightly.
Including the financing, you “pay” for a $999 MacBook Air in just under 3 years. Without the upgrade program, after 3 years you would still have the original MacBook but could trade it in to get a new one or keep using it without making additional payments. With the upgrade program, you may have gotten multiple “free” upgrades in that time, but it’s not clear to me whether you can keep or resell the computer if you stop paying the monthly fee.
Previously:
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First, I'm not really seeing anything on that website to suggest that this is an Apple-CIT partnership. There's nothing at Apple's Newsroom page, so I'm guessing the MacRumors story isn't quite right — this is simply an opportunity CIT saw. (And leasing companies providing computers to businesses is nothing new. It's just that, usually, you talk to leasing companies directly and they'll make you an offer.)
On the one hand, those rates work out to about the same as keeping a new Mac for 33 months, i.e. less than three years, which is below my preferred cycle of ~ four years. I.e., I would end up spending more than by buying outright. OTOH, upgrading after 90 days might mitigate that — you could configure the laptop lower than you otherwise would, because future-proofing matters less, since you can just get a newer model far more frequently.
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