Lately we are hearing several rumors about projects by Apple related to fintech. To the recently mentioned Apple Pay Later we must add the Apple Card savings account, and then add two projects that have not yet been officially announced. The first is Apple Pay Monthly Installments, which would allow us to split larger payments over several months, and the second is the iPhone subscription.
It’s been months since we heard that Apple was working on a subscription program that would allow us to rent devices from the company. We say “rent” for lack of a better word, because the idea is that through monthly installments we would have access to an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, although we do not know the exact conditions of the subscription.
An Apple device for a monthly fee
What we do know, thanks to the Mark Gurman’s latest newsletteris that this subscription program should have been launched alongside the iPhone 13 in fall 2021 or with the iPhone 14 in fall 2022. According to Gurman, the project has experienced “technical and engineering setbacks that have led to slow progress and no longer being able to meet schedules”.
However, according to Gurman, Apple is still working on this idea. A clearly very different from other financing options that are already offered to us as buyers of the iPhone in which we slightly increase the price of the device in exchange for paying it for 12 or 24 months. The subscription that Apple proposes, which it internally calls Project Breakout,  part of a fixed fee that will depend on the type of device.
One of the reasons for the delay is that, according to Gurman, this is “one of the most ambitious financial efforts by Apple.” The reason for this is that instead of relying on external partners, the company wants to carry the entire process internally. Default checks, approvals, transaction history, etc. and everything else would be taken care of by Apple.
Developing the technology to achieve these goals is an important task. Even more so if we take into account that, although Apple has experience in various services, they have little experience in the fintech field. While we wait for Apple Pay Later to launch between March and April of this year, we are completely unaware of Apple’s plans for the iPhone subscription. From Gurman’s words, but, we could deduce that Apple would like to launch the service with an iPhone, so this fall with the iPhone 15 is one of the options. 
