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The iPhone Upgrade Program is Apple's answer to the carrier contract it helped kill: buy the phone from Apple on two years of interest-free payments, AppleCare+ bundled, unlocked for any carrier — and swap to the new model every September after half the payments. Introduced in 2015 as subsidies died, it reframed the iPhone as a subscription with a screen.

The program locks the upgrade cycle to Apple's own register rather than the carriers', feeds pristine one-year-old phones into Apple Trade In's refurbished pipeline, and quietly normalizes the never-paid-off phone. It remains U.S.-centric and iPhone-only — the model for the hardware-as-subscription future Apple keeps being predicted to ship.