The Apple Upgrade programme is set to launch on 28 July, giving consumers the option to lease iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches over multi-year terms rather than paying upfront, with payments processed through buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It is, per Bloomberg’s sources, ‘one of the biggest-ever changes to how the company sells devices.’ Whether it is a revolution or a very polished subscription rebranding exercise is a question worth sitting with.
What the Apple Upgrade Programme Actually Offers
The lease terms vary by product. iPhones and Apple Watches carry terms of up to 24 months, while Macs and iPads stretch to up to 36 months. At the end of the lease, customers can keep the device, return it, or upgrade to something newer. That flexibility extends mid-term too: according to a programme summary, customers can pay off their device early or switch to a new model without waiting for the lease to expire.
The programme also expands leasing beyond iPhones for the first time. Apple’s existing iPhone Upgrade Program covered only handsets and bundled AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss into monthly payments, with upgrade eligibility kicking in after 12 payments. The new programme sweeps in the rest of the hardware lineup, but the snippet language around fees is worth noting: in some cases, ‘transactions will incur an additional fee.’ Apple has not elaborated on when that applies.
Existing iPhone Upgrade Program customers are not being migrated immediately. Apple plans to stop accepting new sign-ups to that programme and funnel everyone into Apple Upgrade instead.
The Price-Pressure Logic Behind the Launch
The timing is not coincidental. Apple has been dealing with an industry-wide shortage of memory chips, a supply squeeze the industry has taken to calling ‘RAMageddon,’ driven substantially by AI infrastructure demand consuming available supply. The resulting cost pressures have already pushed Apple to raise hardware prices. A lease structure that breaks a higher sticker price into monthly instalments is a fairly direct response: the number at the top of the product page looks worse; the number on a monthly bill looks manageable.
Spreading device costs over two to three years also locks customers into the Apple ecosystem for longer stretches. A consumer mid-lease on a Mac is not a consumer browsing alternatives.
Klarna’s Role and Its Own Chapter
For Klarna, the partnership is a significant platform moment. The Swedish fintech’s ordinary shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KLAR, having filed a Form F-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March 2025 ahead of its initial public offering. The company reports under International Financial Reporting Standards and files annual reports with the SEC as a foreign private issuer.
Landing Apple as a distribution partner for a flagship lease programme is exactly the kind of headline a recently listed fintech needs. It validates the consumer credit model at scale, and at a moment when Klarna is still building its post-IPO narrative. Apple, for its part, gets a payments partner with existing infrastructure rather than having to construct another in-house financial product from scratch, following the winding back of Apple Pay Later.
A Busy Season for the New Apple
The launch lands in the middle of a transition at Apple itself. Incoming chief executive John Ternus is stepping into a company managing hardware price inflation, a memory-chip shortage, and an active lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft. None of those are quiet-quarter problems.
In that context, a programme designed to smooth consumers past sticker shock while binding them to multi-year upgrade cycles reads less like a product announcement and more like a structural response to a difficult moment. Whether Klarna can execute the payment infrastructure cleanly at Apple’s volumes will be the first real test. The launch on 28 July is when the fine print meets actual customers.
