Watch programmers and artists pay for lease.

A lot will. My last company leased their hardware. It cost more in the long run but for reasons I never understood it’s better having expenses paid out of opex versus capex.

Yeah, I was in a room with a customer that said point blank “even if it costs us more in opex within a year than buying it as capex, we would rather rent the stuff as opex”

Some accounting bullshit makes them hate having anything that they must count as an “asset” that goes down in value over time. Better to burn the money as “expense” than to have to manage the value burning off over years as “depreciation”.

Lmao. So now I can use my rented services on my rented laptop! I can go get the laptop in my rented car, to go back home to my rented place… it really is going to be you’ll own nothing and like it.

Here’s a solution for you. Use your old MacBook, the one with 2GB of RAM. Use your old copy of Office 2008, the one that requires no subscription and offers no AI assistant. Stop paying for Spotify, find your old mp3 collection, convert all those CDs you never play anymore. You want television? Don’t pay subscriptions for that either, buy an HD antenna, get your local stations over the air. If it doesn’t have everything you want, suck it up or pirate it, your call.

My point is, you can choose a different path, but it takes a choice.

You know, dumb flip phones are coming back, people are realizing they don’t need all the crap they’re paying for, it doesn’t all make life better. It takes conviction to trade in your smart phone for a dumb one, but people are doing it.

Why would you make it harder than it is?

libre office and you got an open source Office suite

Libre office got me through college without having to pay for ms office… which they still charged for even with a student discount.

PIRATE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Great film, I recommend it.

Lol to apple fanboys. ThinkSubscription

If it works for Apple, Samsung and Google will be next in line to do the same. Enshittification is in no way limited to Apple.

I was more referring to people who refuse to use open source because they are locked into apple and think its good and “secure”. Well, this is what they get.

Or you could buy it using BestBuy financing. Or just buy the one you can afford.

Best Buy financing is pretty sick, 0% for 24 mos on high-dollar items. I bought a ~14-year-old house that still had the original washer and dryer in it and immediately replaced them with brand new, warrantied ones in a way that didn’t force me to pay extra to some do-nothing rent-taker and that I didn’t even feel the hit financially. Promotional shit like that feels scammy sometimes, but it definitely has its place if you use it judiciously.

The beginning of HaaS (Hardware as a service)

[it is very bad]

Not the beginning, ‘Device as a Service’ has been the buzzword as of late, but basically has been a thing for decades. I remember twenty years ago scratching my head at why the company I worked at paid more to lease desktops for three years than it would have cost to just buy them outright, or even finance them.

The amount we spend on cloud hosting I keep suggesting (and I think they are starting to listen) that having on-prem hardware makes financial sense again. We have the staff to run them already anyway.

Heh, to some extent I think the hardware vendors have done this to themselves.

They try to balance “good TCO if you just buy it” but simultaneously say “but it sucks to own the equipment you need to pay us exorbitant services fees to make it easier to own”.

Nothing unique to IT, certainly car manufacturers love to first sell you on how robust the car is and then try to scare you into thinking it’ll turn to dust if you don’t buy extended warranties…

It’s already here unfortunately. For example, you can now lease a PlayStation 5

We used to rent a PS2 from blockbuster back when it was the current gen lol

Yeah, and you could rent VCRs long before that.

I am so happy I built a new computer at the end of 2024. It may realistically last me two decades at this rate. I got one decade out of the last build.

I maxed out my configuration at 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD around the same time.

I feel like it’s been like this for a long time now.

Wow! How lucky are we?!! This also happens to coincide with Apple raising chocolate rations from 10 to 8!!!

that’s a lot of chocolate.

Double plus good brother!

Leasing is not renting

For tech stuff basically a financial entity buys the goods for you at full MSRP (they calculate a almost 100% depreciation over the term), then you pay that full price + interest over 48/60 installments, and when you’re done, they take the goods back and sell it back via some liquidator.

And because the financial entity bought the stuff for you especially to lease it, you’re contractually obligated to pay until the end of the contract, can’t just get it for a month and then be done with it

You paid $1200 to use something worth $900 for four years and then it’s not yours

Unless you’re a business and the accountant says that’s better for taxes, leasing something doesn’t make sense

I hope you’re not saying this in general terms, because leasing absolutely has its benefits even to individuals, especially for cars.

for cars it makes sense only if you really need to have a new vehicle every 3 years and you really need to have an all inclusive insurance that covers everything

otherwise you save thousands by taking a loan, get limited liability insurance, then sell it after 5-6 years

although the absolute savings (for a newish vehicle and not a shitbox) is to get a used one ex-leasing (max 3 years old, low mileage, all maintenance made correctly because the leasing company paid for it) then sell it after 3-4 years (or keep it until it becames a shitbox)

Google novated leases and you’ll see why you’re wrong.

They seems better, never heard them before, not a thing in my country

Heck, even paying for full comprehensive insurance, you still come out ahead by buying on a loan and keeping it for more than 3 years.

The crux is that decently priced loans are denied to the people who actually need it, but leases are not.

And also that the car dealer takes a way fatter commission on a lease (commissions on insurances, commission on the extended warranty) so (at least here in my country) sometimes they “accidentally” incorrectly fill the request form with “wrong” data (like higher income, different employment status and so on)

Shit like this just makes me wanna delete all the Apple compatibility stuff from my open source projects. It’s not like they’re fully realized (I cannot afford a Mac, not even a used one), but it just demotivates me from supporting their OSes and hardware.

You should delete apple anyway. Why does ANYONE use that garbage?

People who think they (still) make nice hardware. If anything, they made hardware worse by setting trends other manufacturers now also follow.

No one who has ever had to crack one open and work on it think they make nice hardware. Its consumer unfriendly trash.

You may not like it but Apple’s choices produce performant hardware and their laptops have had better battery life than other HW for what feels like well more than a decade. It could very well be harder to repair but I’ve had a ton of Mac’s and none have required repair.

I have 110 dell 5420 AIO PC’s and fifteen 2019 mac AIO. I have had exactly one board failure, two screen failures and two nvme failures on the dells since 2019.

The 2019 dell AIO have had four bad screens which cost way more than the Dells to replace not counting extras like tape kits to reattach them. I’ve had five with bad ram. You have to completely disassemble them to change the ram. I’ve also had two of the macs develop non memory related failures. All of these were problems I had to fix after they went out of warranty. While they were in warranty I had one screen failure and one memory failure. So please tell me how good they are. I’m sure I will overlook the shit show time sink they represent for me to give your experience precedence over mine

I’m sure I will overlook the shit show time sink they represent for me to give your experience precedence over mine

That isn’t a gross overreaction at all. You seem like a delight to be around.

It isn’t. You just lack the basic knowledge and experience to make the statements you make. Because I rub you the wrong way you can’t imagine I get along just fine with people.

You have limited experience with a few apple products. I’ve had to deal with a sample of fifteen purchased at the same time from apple. My sample has a high failure rate. When I started having trouble with them I found others who were having similar problems.

Goodbye.

You just make completely baseless assumptions and then keep on going. Your statements are entirely divorced from reality. Plus you are a massive asshole on top of that.

You’re still paying for the more expensive ram. It’s just baked into a higher monthly rental payment. Why pay more for ram one time when you could pay more for ram every month for the rest of your life?

When a company says it has a “solution” for the high price, they means they have a “solution” for the big number on the sticker. Not that they actually care about affordability.

when the $ numbers start getting big and scary, just extend the length some more to make it look ‘cheaper’… like 8 year car loans and 50 year mortgages.

Yeah, had a car dealer try to say “the price doesn’t even matter, only the monthly payment matters, right?”

The problem for those of us who know better: this reasoning works on most of the customers and it’s more profitable to do that than cater to more savvy customers.

Any idea when the Chinese RAMs are going to flood enough of the market to lower the price?

Given how long that would take, I’d guess that we will see OpenAI backing out of some of their purchasing commitments as a price pressure before then.

Sam Altman basically single handedly committed to buying almost half of the world’s RAM capacity, and on other fronts OpenAI has already backing out of some of its more egregiously stupid business decisions. I’m sure the purchasing commitments are only a matter of time to come up on that chopping block.

We ALL hope so.

This actually makes some sense, since I’m genuinely interested in 1.5TB of integrated ram and what you can do with it, but don’t really want to shell out the 30k it will cost.

30k?!? It would be more like 50. I was lucky enough to get three 512gb Mac Studios for work and they were over 10k each. And this was before RAM went through the roof.

This was so insanely predictable. I wouldnt be surprised if all the tech giants move to do the same. “you will own nothing”

“defeat.” I think you mean “realize their evil ambitions.”

You will own nothing

On a practical note: we need to mock this to the point that anyone who actually does it will instantly be a social pariah. This needs to be so embarrassingly stupid that the companies who offer it literally blush, something non-human entities typically can’t do. Gamers Nexus had a good video about NZXT doing this and broke down the math for the numerically challenged.

Any other ideas for making this fail in a country where the consumer protection agencies are often worse than nobody paying attention at all?

yes … but remember the horse armor? people do be gullible

It ain’t perfect but it’s pretty good and gets better all the time:

asahilinux.org/fedora/

Get an “old” m1 and rock out. Fuck Apple.

This is why I will never sell my M1 MBA.

M1 rules it’s lightning on asahi fedora

I knew this was going to happen eventually but the fact that it’s happened so soon is insane to me.

They’ve been doing it for businesses for decades so this isn’t really surprising honestly

F U C K

T H A T

I’d rather go back to 2007 and main my Intel Core 2 Duo than rent a PC. We’re going backwards not forwards guys…

Honestly, the level of doublethink on display by some Apple fans is impressive normally but this is amazing. Apple “defeats” RAM prices by making you pay for something several times over while not actually getting to own it? Fucking bootlickers.