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My SO recently bought an electric bike using this sort of scheme, not from Apple obviously, but the monthly payments toward the 3500$ bike were less than what i

My SO recently bought an electric bike using this sort of scheme, not from Apple obviously, but the monthly payments toward the 3500$ bike were less than what it cost to commute to work using public transport before that. So it turned from an being a non trivial investment to an obvious thing to do. The value proposition to me seems to be that they sold a bike at 3500$ they would not have sold otherwise and they can deal with the payment being made over time rather than all at purchase time. For the user the value proposition is that value adding purchases like this can be made and paid off while they provide value.

rootusrootus 4y ago
That situation is close to the textbook example for when a debt hawk like Dave Ramsey would tell you it was okay to use a credit card. When you are actually using it to facilitate an investment in your future, not just buying toys. The additional zero-interest aspect is icing on the cake.
- florbnit 4y ago
  > When you are actually using it to facilitate an investment in your future I might have expressed this poorly, but it wasn’t an “investment in the future”. And that’s exactly what made it interesting. The monthly costs where lower immediately, since the cost of transport which was saved was higher than the monthly cost to pay for the bike. It was just a straight up cost reduction due to the structure of the payment. Had the zero interest monthly payments not been available then it would have been the more typical “investment/ROI over time” situation, and there might be an argument for it still being beneficiary to go into debt to make the purchase because over the long run it would pay of again. But the payment structure just makes everything a thousand times simpler.