Apple Kills the iPhone Upgrade Program, Swaps It for a Lease Model

Apple is winding down its iPhone Upgrade Program, the annual-upgrade financing plan that bundled a device installment loan with AppleCare+. Existing members keep making their remaining monthly payments for now, but the program is closed to its old structure and Apple is steering customers toward a replacement.

The successor is Apple Upgrade, a leasing program rather than a financed-purchase one. Instead of paying off a loan and owning the phone, customers lease the hardware over a chosen term, make lower monthly payments, and return the device when the lease ends to move onto a new one. Notably, Apple has widened the scope beyond phones: the lease covers iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. Buyers can still finance through Apple, take a carrier deal, or pay outright.

The shift matters because it changes the ownership economics of Apple’s upgrade path. A lease keeps users in a continuous return-and-replace cycle without ever building equity in the hardware, which locks customers more tightly into Apple’s ecosystem and recurring-payment model while extending that model across Apple’s whole device lineup rather than just the iPhone.