There are deals to be had out there. I got a 2015 Dell Optiplex for $20 at a thrift shop. I got a cheap 128GB SSD and 16GB of DDR3 RAM for it. Unless you're a gamer, you probably don't need a new computer. Buy used when possible. Especially DO NOT rent one.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
126 points (94.4% liked)
Technology
86512 readers
3058 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy." WEF
You will own nothing!
Heh.
No.
Uhh people are financing their weekly groceries now, dumb as this is I am not exactly stressing it, being able to lease cars didn't take away cars from the rest of us.
"Fuck you, I got mine" attitude.
Uh-oh
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.
You forgot about using your rented Mac for playing rented games, music and movies.
Mac’s can play games????
Yeah, they always have.
Such a stupid saying. Nobody likes it.
You will own nothing but corporations will still hold you, the consumer, responsible when their decisions have catastrophic outcomes for everybody.
It's their only option when people can't afford shit
I mean, its decidedly not, but its certainly the option that means the least effort and most profit on their part.
End stage capitalism boys. Its down the tubes until collapse/revolution.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Fuck this shit
I was like damn you almost got me the onion
If you give it back with scratches on it, will you be into negative equity? 😬 I assume it'll come with all the bad parts of car leasing, too...
The lease contract includes 30,000 cpu-core-hours, any additional time will be billed at $0.10 per cpu-core-hour.
/s
Jfc, stop giving them ideas!
I see the /s there, but it feels as likely as not.
Imagine leasing a laptop for only X number of charging cycles allowed.
And yet somehow worse. Don't have to spend hours finding important files on my car's hard drive before returning it to the dealership
You’ll need your own storage to backup before erasing and turning it in, but they probably know that and will factor that in for a fee.
“Rent X months, get an SSD with your backup for free when you cancel your subscription.”
They’ll likely try to upsell you on iCloud services as well. Your entire life will be digitized and uploaded into the cloud, onto some corporate computer somewhere.
My issue with this is that you can often get a cheap laptop used, and major cities often have libraries that rent laptops to residents, if needed. And paying your library is cheaper than paying Apple, plus the money goes to the local library.📚
load more comments
(1 replies)
You will own nothing and fucking like it!
Lol! Not fucking chance in hell.
You just know that apple idiots will line up to get this.
Soon, you'll be having people leasing laptops and trading them in every year for the new model, perpetually paying a monthly fee to have the best and newest laptop from apple.
Sony was doing this with the fucking PS5.
It's wild people don't see the parrel to how 99% of Americans "buy" new phones....
That's 100% what Apple is going for, laptops the same as iphones.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I'd be more surprised if people weren't already doing this. They do with iPhones when they lease and upgrade with their carrier.
I don’t think people care as much about the latest and greatest laptop as they do smartphones. That mindset about phones is also just as true with Android fanboys as it is Apple fanboys. Apple haters love to criticize when Apple does something like this but when the rest of the industry follows suit, they show us how much non-Apple users eat that shit up too.
knew this was coming. it's Apple's MO since...like....ever since the company started. Let someone else do it first and then try to do it better. HP is already doing this, Apple is going to "improve it".
Companies with high-end products have the biggest profit margin cushions to deal with. I had little sympathy for Apple raising prices already, but this is absurd.
they will still require you to either pay for the device in full or else lose the option to sell it to somebody else after you’re done
...Minus the payments already provided, right?
The Apple Upgrade service will work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. In certain cases, those transactions will incur an additional fee .
This sounds exactly like what the major cell providers do with phones, or at least what AT&T does. Monthly interest-free payment to pay for the phone in 24 or 36 months, 'upgrade' available at half or an arbitrary percentage of the device having been paid off. It's 'your' device, but to sell it you have to pay off the balance remaining on the note. If you upgrade early, and the device is still in good condition, they zero out the note at that point, but it still counts as buying a new device, so you incur tax + an arbitrary 'activation' fee just like you bought a new device with cash.
…Minus the payments already provided, right?
It's very vague. If you could use this as a rent-to-own it's perhaps not so bad, but if it's just rent-to-still-not-be-able-to-own it sucks.
Macrumors is reporting it as an "Apple Upgrade" financing program to replace the existing iPhone Upgrade Program. Financing, not leasing.
While there are still cheaper DDR5 options at lower speeds, the 32GB of DDR5 @ 8000MT I bought at $579 in February is now $700 on Amazon and even more elsewhere.
At the time I was convinced that the industry was moving towards a full-leasing only model, and so I decided to invest in some future proofing. It took less than 6 months for the price to start jumping again. Whether this is deliberate, or simply an emergent quality of supply/demand of the new AI economy probably doesn’t matter. The bar for private compute power is being shoved higher and higher by data centers and the PC industry’s response is to move towards a leasing model.
I foresee that eventually that when PC hardware becomes too expensive or completely unavailable in consumer markets, your PC will become like your phone - a locked-down, remotely managed, integrated hardware system that you lease as a unit, along with a cloud services subscription. Or, a thin client with the bare minimum specs to accommodate cloud computing. Extrapolating from this - a privatized Internet hostile to client computers unauthenticated by a major company or government entity running a recognized digital fiefdom where uncontrolled local compute will be viewed as highly suspicious.
If you still have the means and the interest, I suggest investing in consumer PC hardware to:
-
Demonstrate this market is still viable.
-
Buy hardware before it jumps in price again.
-
Claw back some of the local compute power being engineered away from consumers.
Of course, the AI economic bubble is due for collapse and cheap hardware may suddenly flood the market in a few years. However, I’m betting there is enough runway and monetization left to fund the pathway to the end of common PC ownership.
Whether this is deliberate, or simply an emergent quality of supply/demand of the new AI economy probably doesn’t matter.
Both...
The handful of companies that can make ram realized that as long as they all go full in on AI, no one else can make consumer ram without spending tens of billions of dollars on fabrication sites
So the less they make, the more profit per unit. If any one of them started making more, we wouldn't have the price crunch and they'd all have to make more to justify keeping production running, further reducing price.
That makes at home computing cheaper, pulling people away from various cloud infrastructure they want to keep afloat because that's where the high priced chips go.
It's all a house of cards to shove data centers down our throats, because that's where the profit is in the moment.
End datecenter, and ram prices plummet
Wait, don't new iPhones and Macs have that unified memory? Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't Apple be in the best position with regards to memory prices in their products?
Yes, you are missing something. You are assuming they get their memory from a different supplier than the rest of the industry.
For some reason lots of people assume this.
My understanding, though, is they have their own chip specs, for custom die nobody else uses , and they integrate that into their chiplets or whatever it is they are using. So it's not like those vendors can just sell those die to other customers. Whoever is making Apple's RAM is making it specifically for them.
Unless their contracts with Apple have some sort of escalation clause, I would figure Apple would be pretty insulated from all this price nonsense. Heck, they have enough cash on hand that I bet they can buy a smaller RAM vendor if they had to. It mainly depends on how much of that custom RAM tech they own vs. licensing from any particular vendor. If they are using patents from their vendor, then that makes it harder to just switch.
Glad I scooped up an M4 Mac Mini earlier this year before all this RAM shortage. Say what you will about Apple, but their M chips are great. Leasing a laptop though? Yeah, no.
view more: next ›