It’s because eliminating outright sales altogether would result in numerous negative consequences.
There would certainly be consequences, but would they outweigh the benefits? In the short term Apple can motor on taking a hit if there will be a good return later on. Don't forget they have so much cash they have trouble bringing it home, so there's a lot of money abroad which could usefully be spent on abroad to achieve some end.
Decimating their market share during that period would be something that would be very difficult to recover from.
they’ll need to make sure that you are financially capable of paying the fee, before they hand you a $500-1300 piece of hardware. That means credit checks. And that means having some alternate mechanism for people who fail the credit check to obtain the device anyway.
Maybe. Adobe isn't bothered by this, and perhaps Apple would go the same way: your phone phones home all the time (which they all do anyway) and won't work if it's not authorised. Sure, some toerag could decide he wants to nick it, but it will be worthless (apart from perhaps as parts) since it won't work. All phones already have that kind of capability built in but it's a drag to activate and it only deals with connections. Apple can easily extend that to just locking the entire thing.
Again, comparisons with software are disingenuous. If an Adobe customer stops paying, Adobe doesn’t lose anything (other than a customer). If a hardware rental customer stops paying, they have lost the hardware, and recovering it would likely exceed its value. This is why leasing and renting at sensible rates requires a credit check, and why no-credit-check/low credit score rentals are obscenely expensive.
Apple already has activation locks, etc., which they already use to lock demo devices stolen from stores. (Which is why some devices aren’t even locked down.) But even such devices have some residual value on the used market.
Third, they rely heavily on third party resellers (especially mobile network operators) to sell a ton of devices. If they pulled out of that, depriving those network operators of their cut of the sale price, you bet those companies would start pushing competing products HARD.
They'll still need distributors sell the contracts, distribute the phones, update the stuff, etc. But if, over time, the sellers were no longer necessary that wouldn't be a hard stop. It would be a temporary problem if it happened overnight, but it won't.
The whole point here, as I understood it, was that the “subscription” would be billed just like Apple’s online services. I cannot imagine any scenario where Apple would want to force resellers into being agents for a financial service. It just doesn’t make sense if the goal is to increase your own revenue.
What do you mean about resellers needing to “update” the phones? Arguably the most important change Apple caused in the mobile phone industry is breaking the carriers’ stronghold on phone software. To this day, Apple does not create carrier-specific software, nor give them veto power over software releases. (They only allow carriers to create config files for the OS.)
Finally, they also know that there will be many customers, including some large companies, which do not want to lease.
Yes, but as I pointed out, things have changed a lot and now leasing software is now accepted as normal. And phones are not exactly irreplaceable as software is - if you lose the phone or switch brand you don't find you can no longer contact all your old friends! I don't think the leasing aspect will be much of a problem for an Apple product - you buy into the walled garden precisely because Apple basically oversee everything. Finally, you already cough a subscription on phones just to make calls. Extending that to the hardware won't be a big issue. The lack of old ewaste in the drawer you can't get rid of, and a new model every year or two, will be attractive.
Repeat after me until you actually
understand this: Hardware 👏 is 👏 not 👏 software. 👏
The fact that software companies have been able to force consumers and small businesses into subscriptions (a change that didn’t affect large customers anyway, since they have used subscription-style site licenses since forever) doesn’t mean it translates into hardware.
People but Apple because they want stuff that
works. The fact that the walled garden is how Apple provides this doesn’t mean the walled garden is the thing people are after.
Comparisons with software are pointless and disingenuous: there’s nothing to recover if someone stops paying. They just disable the software and that’s that, but no capital is lost.
Maybe. The economics will change anyway since you don't want the old phones you've just upgraded polluting the market, so the hardware would have to be disposable (at least recyclable) and losing some will be priced in. Phones can also tell the bounty hunters where they are...
If Apple didn’t want “old” phones “polluting” the market, they wouldn’t sell refurb units, nor sell on pre-owned units onto the secondary market, which they do.
And if Apple wanted to artificially limit the useful life of “old” phones, they wouldn’t offer the hands-down, by a wide margin, longest software support for their phones.
Just… sorry, none of your argument makes sense.