Not the beginning, ‘Device as a Service’ has been the buzzword as of late, but basically has been a thing for decades. I remember twenty years ago scratching my head at why the company I worked at paid more to lease desktops for three years than it would have cost to just buy them outright, or even finance them.

The amount we spend on cloud hosting I keep suggesting (and I think they are starting to listen) that having on-prem hardware makes financial sense again. We have the staff to run them already anyway.

Heh, to some extent I think the hardware vendors have done this to themselves.

They try to balance “good TCO if you just buy it” but simultaneously say “but it sucks to own the equipment you need to pay us exorbitant services fees to make it easier to own”.

Nothing unique to IT, certainly car manufacturers love to first sell you on how robust the car is and then try to scare you into thinking it’ll turn to dust if you don’t buy extended warranties…

It’s already here unfortunately. For example, you can now lease a PlayStation 5

We used to rent a PS2 from blockbuster back when it was the current gen lol

Yeah, and you could rent VCRs long before that.