Would you rent a MacBook for under three bucks a day — for three years?
December 14th, 2006So here’s the deal: Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.)
The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care.
Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations compared this deal to getting a €150 rebate on the price of a MacBook (€1099) plus an additional two years of AppleCare (€319) — in that €35 that pays for the computer x 36 months = €1260. However, M. Wenes didn’t explain what happens at the end of the three-year deal. (There also appears to be a rent-to-buy option, but it’s unclear how that works out.)
Either way, if you in France and you’re one of the first 200 people to sign up, Orange will toss you an iPod shuffle for an additional euro.
I know a lot of people who would take this deal (possibly myself included) in a heartbeat.
[via MuniWireless]
December 15th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
[...] http://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/?p=1200 [...]
December 15th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
No.
December 16th, 2006 at 11:17 am
In the USA or Canada, a one-year old MacBook can be sold for around $365 less than purchase price. It’s even better if you can take advantage of student discounts. DSL is about $0.80-1.5 per day, (depending on location) with a one year commitment. Roughly, that’s $1.5-2.5/day for a new computer (and DSL contract) every year. How much would this cost in France?
December 16th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Um, MacBooks aren’t even a year old.
December 17th, 2006 at 12:56 am
[...] You see, Your Majesty, Moore’s law suggests that everything in technology doubles in use but halves in cost every 18 months, that period of time has now shortened to just 3 months if you look at the various technological products and services the world over. Hard disks are approaching 1TB in capacity for a very reasonable price, a price that we happily paid for 1/10th of that capacity just a couple of years ago. The same thing with Internet speeds and available bandwidth; people in the developed and some in the not-so-developed worlds are enjoying speeds of 8MB (that’s a Big B Your Majesty, not a small one) paying not more than BD30 a month. In France, the telcos there started renting MacBooks with 1Mb connections for as little as 2 Euros a day; yet in your own blessed country, Your Majesty, we are being Royally shafted – if you would pardon my French as I cannot find a more appropriate term – by Your Company, the exalted Batelco for BD60 a month for a measly 2Mb (yes, that’s a small b) with a bandwidth limitation of just 20GB. [...]
December 18th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
[...] Would you rent a MacBook for under three bucks a day — for three years? [Cyrus Farivar] Via BoingBoing. [...]
December 21st, 2006 at 7:31 pm
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