The iPhone 18 Pro could be the first iPhone you rent instead of buy - tech-ish

This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.

Apple’s September event is expected to bring the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the company’s first foldable, with nothing cheaper arriving until 2027. It will also be the first iPhone launch since Apple stopped lending Americans the money to buy a phone and started renting them the phone instead.

That change happened on 28 July. Apple Upgrade lets people in the United States pay a fixed monthly amount for an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch rather than buy it, with the Swedish payments company Klarna providing the lease. Apple shut down the iPhone Upgrade Program the same day, after almost eleven years. That plan was a 24-month interest-free loan and the phone was yours at the end. We covered what replaced it and how the mechanics work.

The new phone will not be cheap. Jeff Pu of GF Securities told clients on 31 July that the iPhone 18 Pro models could cost $250 to $300 more than the current ones, which start at $1,099 and $1,199. Spreading a number like that across 24 months makes the shelf price far easier to look at, which is the appeal of any lease.

An iPhone 17 Pro currently leases at $31.99 a month, roughly KES 4,144 at 129.53 shillings to the dollar. Apple takes no deposit and charges no interest of any kind. Its own leasing page states that if you return the device in good working condition you will not pay more than its full price.

Every word of that is accurate. It is still not the full calculation.

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What you actually pay for is two years of depreciation

Apple’s worked example is an iPhone 17 Pro with 256GB storage, list price $1,099. Over 24 months at $31.99 you pay $767.76, which is 69.9% of the price. The 12-month option at $45.99 comes to $551.88, or 50.2%.

Those ratios repeat across the line. The iPhone 17 at $799, the iPhone Air at $999 and the iPhone 17e at $599 all cost between 69% and 72% of their price over 24 months, and all four models sit within half a percentage point of 50% on a 12-month term.

Klarna is not lending you money and charging for it. Klarna is selling you the use of a phone and keeping the phone. The monthly figure is Apple’s estimate of how much value the device loses while you hold it. A 24-month lease says an iPhone is worth about 30% of its price after two years, and a 12-month lease says about half after one.

Keep the phone and you pay what Apple calls the purchase option fee, which is the list price minus everything you have already paid. On the iPhone 17 Pro that is $331.24. Add it to the $767.76 and you get $1,099 exactly.

Apple has not priced the iPhone 18 Pro and has not said it will be in the scheme, though the terms cover the current line and upgrades go to the latest generation. If Pu’s $250 to $300 forecast lands and the 70% ratio holds, a 24-month lease on a $1,349 iPhone 18 Pro works out near $39 a month, or about KES 5,090. The monthly figure barely moves. What you hand back at the end does not.

Test that 30% against Apple’s own trade-in desk

The iPhone 16 Pro went on sale in September 2024, so it is now about 23 months old. That is almost exactly the age of a phone coming off a 24-month lease. When Apple last revised its United States trade-in estimates on 27 May 2026, MacRumors logged the iPhone 16 Pro at up to $560.

Apple’s leasing arm prices a two-year-old Pro iPhone at about $331. Apple’s trade-in desk offers up to $560 for one. That $560 covers the highest storage tier in excellent condition, so the figure for a specific 256GB handset is lower, and neither number is guaranteed. The direction is still clear.

Hand the phone back after 24 months and you return something worth more than the amount you would have paid to keep it.

That is the answer to why people call this a bad deal despite the absence of interest. There is no interest. There is a residual value, and Apple has set it conservatively, which is what every leasing company does. You are paying for the convenience of never thinking about resale.

It produces one odd result. For an American who wants to own the phone anyway, the cheapest route is to lease and then pay the buyout. The total is $1,099 either way, but the lease spreads it over 24 months at no cost and needs no Apple Card.

Mac and iPad are a different sum

Longer terms shrink the monthly number without improving the deal. A 14-inch MacBook Pro with 16GB is $38.99 a month over 36 months, or $1,403.64 against a $1,999 price, which is 70.2%. A 256GB iPad Pro is $24.99 a month over 36 months, or $899.64 against $1,199, which works out at 75.0% and is the worst ratio in the scheme.

So leasing lets you use an expensive Mac cheaply only in the sense that renting is cheaper than buying, and that matters more for Macs than phones because people keep Macs longer. A MacBook Pro used for six years costs its purchase price once. Leased twice across those six years it costs about 140% of that at today’s prices, and you finish with nothing.

Where “look after it and hand it back” meets the contract

Apple publishes no damage fee schedule. Its FAQ says only that if the device comes back in poor condition and you hold no AppleCare cover, Klarna charges a one-time damage fee. AppleCare is not included and Apple bills it separately. A case and a screen protector cut the risk, but the size of that bill appears nowhere in the terms.

Theft is the sharper problem. Activation Lock ties the handset to your Apple Account, and Apple says this dramatically reduces the commercial value of a stolen iPhone, with a parts-level version limiting component resale too. None of that protects you financially on a lease. Apple’s FAQ is explicit: if a leased device is lost or stolen and you do not hold AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss, you pay the purchase option fee, the full price minus what you have paid so far.

The phone being worthless to the thief does not reduce what you owe Klarna.

Leaving early works the same way. You get 14 days after delivery to cancel, and after that the termination fee equals every remaining payment to the end of the term. Leasing an iPhone also means signing up with AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon on a plan that is not prepaid, though the handset stays unlocked.

Whether any of this reaches Kenya

Apple has announced no plans to take Apple Upgrade anywhere else. The iPhone Upgrade Program launched in the United States in 2015 and later reached the United Kingdom, so there is precedent, and Klarna already operates across Europe, Canada and Australia. Kenya is nowhere near that list, and not only because there is no Apple retail store anywhere in Africa. A lease needs somebody to carry residual risk, a credit file to underwrite against, and consumer leasing law to enforce the contract.

What we have instead is financing that costs a multiple of retail. TechTrends reported last year that most Kenyan buyers on daily payment plans pay two or three times the sticker price, which is roughly what Embakasi East MP Babu Owino described when he said he would table a bill to cap those margins. Against that, a scheme charging 70% of retail and capping your total at 100% looks unusually mild.

One piece of it may arrive sooner. Before the launch, 9to5Mac found code in the iOS 27 beta for a system called App Managed Features, which would let an approved financing partner check a device’s payment status and drop it into a Restricted Mode that blocks most apps, alongside a Partner Finance Lock that survives a factory reset. Apple then told The Verge it will not use Restricted Mode for Apple Upgrade, and did not say what it is for.

9to5Mac’s suggestion is that it was built for carriers and retailers in markets where locking a phone is already how instalment credit gets enforced. India banned that practice for non-bank lenders in late 2024, and in May the Reserve Bank of India proposed allowing a limited version on loans 90 days overdue.

Kenya already runs on that mechanism. M-KOPA, Watu Simu and Safaricom’s Lipa Mdogo Mdogo all lock handsets when payments stop, and every device on those plans is an Android: M-KOPA sells its own handsets plus Samsung, and Lipa Mdogo Mdogo sells Neon, TECNO and itel. Apple does not offer lenders a supported way to do the same to an iPhone. If iOS 27 changes that, financed iPhones become possible in Kenya long before leased ones do.

So we most likely get the enforcement first and the terms later, if at all. The nearer thing to watch is price. Apple left the iPhone out of its June increases, and September is where that ends if Pu is right. Kenyan reseller prices follow a US increase within weeks, and none of us will have the option of paying for it monthly at 70%.

Reporting originally appeared via Tech-ish Kenya. Read the full source for additional context.