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May 03, 2005
I wanna lease my next computer
I was walking back home today, and as i crossed the campus of the school where i am no longer a student (yay for graduation!), i thought about the University's computer purchases. With their frequent rounds of hardware upgrades, i assume they lease the many Dells and Apples they have populating their computer labs. Every year or so, they seem to get new ones, despite the old ones being plenty quick for most people (heck, i'd love one of the 'old' ones...).
So, i thought, "why don't companies do this for personal use?" Why can't i go to my favorite computer company and lease a computer, similar to how i would lease a car (provided i could afford a car now...) ? I pondered the details of such a business endeavor, and came up with the following:
-- leasing period would commonly be for one year
-- after one year, the customer could trade-in their computer for a presently comparable one, downgrade to a simpler one, upgrade to a better one, or change models (desktop to laptop, etc.)
-- they could buy upgrades along the way (faster graphics card, more RAM)
-- leasing cost could be about a $2/day for an entry-level computer, about $5/day for a nice gaming-style powerhouse)
And here's the clincher: let them keep their own hard drive. Personal data is the only reason people don't want to part with their computer -- upgrading or changing computers is easy, except for the data preservation task. If you allow the customer to keep their data, you simply take the old hard drive out of the old one and plug it into the new one. And if they want a new OS or a different HD or whatever, offer a simple data migration service for a small fee. This way they have no fear of someone else getting their computer and 'resurrecting' their supposedly deleted information.
Trading in these used computers shouldn't be that difficult of a situation to solve: consumers already purchase 'refurbished' computers for a discounted price, and big companies already have leasing programs that take back businesses' used computers, so they are doing something with them.
Apparently Dell used to do something similar to this idea with a program called "Consumer Leasing". Currently however, it seems they discontinued it, allowing only businesses to lease computers, and offering personal home/office consumers just the 90-day no-interest financing deal. There are also a number of 'rent-a-pc' companies out there, but they seem to be 'mom and pop'-style ones, with (pardon the insult) sketchy and simplistic websites and outdated equipment. They also seem to be renting equipment for a very short time, like days or weeks (more like renting a car during vacation, not leasing a car long-term).
So, is this not a profitable business? Or do big companies just make more money selling computers outright for $500 a pop? It would seem to me that, especially for consumers looking to not spend a lot, leasing would let them get a considerably nicer computer for a small initial sum of money.
Posted by MaTT at May 3, 2005 12:07 AM
Comments
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Posted by: at May 21, 2005 10:42 AM