Apple Upgrade Almost Included ‘White-Glove’ Preconfigured iPhones
James A. Molnar
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Last month, Apple launched Apple Upgrade, a new program that makes it even easier to buy (and of course, keep buying) your favorite Apple devices. However, while it’s not much more than a glorified, zero-interest leasing plan, it seems that Apple had at least one other trick up its sleeve that it decided to scrap.
To recap, Apple Upgrade replaces the old iPhone Upgrade Program that was introduced in 2015, with a new leasing arrangement that can be applied to Macs and iPads as easily as iPhones. While it has a few other wrinkles, the biggest difference on the surface is that you’ll now need to purchase AppleCare+ separately.
The old iPhone Upgrade Program included AppleCare, but that was undoubtedly built into the cost of the plan in some way. The new Apple Upgrade program makes it entirely optional, but since you’re still leasing the device in question, it’s a good idea to add it on. After all, the new program is a traditional lease in every sense of the word: you make monthly payments that cover the depreciation of a device over 12 to 36 months, at the end of which you either hand it back or pay the residual to buy it out.
Of course, Apple undoubtedly hopes that most folks will do the former, trading in their old iPhone, iPad, or Mac and taking out another Apple Upgrade lease on the latest hardware. After all, it kind of stings to pay another $300 or more to hold on to a two-year-old iPhone when you can simply flip it and get a brand new one for the same $20–$40 per month. That’s probably why Apple has managed to work out a zero-interest deal with Klarna, the financial provider backing the program.
The ‘White-Glove Component’
While the zero percent leasing is probably the nicest hook in the Apple Upgrade program, the company had planned to also ship customers devices out preconfigured with all their data, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported over the weekend:
I’ve now learned there was more discussed when this idea was conceived years ago. Apple had contemplated a so-called white-glove component, where your new device each year would arrive at home ready to go, preloaded with all of your data via your iCloud backup.
While Gurman doesn’t seem to have any specific on why Apple abandoned the idea, he draws the logical conclusion that the company was worried about the optics of it having access to consumer data.
It’s not hard to see how this would conflict with Apple’s “privacy-first” marketing approach. While a good number of iPhone owners already assume Apple has access to their data in some way, there’s still a silent majority of consumers who take the company’s privacy promises at face value. Sending an iPhone out with all your most personal information already loaded on it would risk upending what’s generally been a quiet privacy narrative.
Gurman notes there’s not really a technical reason Apple couldn’t have pulled it off — especially for folks who aren’t using Advanced Data Protection — as iCloud backups aren’t otherwise encrypted, so restoring users’ data from one would be entirely doable. Some data is always end-to-end encrypted, such as passwords, health, journal, and home data, so the end user might have still needed to go through some kind of setup process to “unlock” this data — likely by signing in to their iCloud account with their normal credentials during setup.
This would have necessitated Apple baking some new code into iOS 27 and its other operating systems to handle a first-time setup process, not only to unlock this always-encrypted data, but also to handle things like activating the iPhone and transferring over an eSIM. In the end, Apple likely decided the process simply wasn’t worth the effort, especially considering the trade-off in privacy optics.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
