How would something like this affect CarPlay? I have Car Play in all of my vehicles and I'm not about to give up CAr Play or switch cars just to get rid of a charging port.

Immigrants, documented or not, tend to commit crimes at a smaller rate than native born Americans.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018...

As we said, there aren’t readily available nationwide crime statistics broken down by immigration status. But the available research that estimates the relationship between illegal immigration and crime generally shows an association with lower crime rates.

This may lead to Netflix buying/building its own cinemas just to show movies in.

As it is right now (pre-2019 BMWs and every other car that comes with CarPlay), CarPlay is a feature of the car, like a CD player. So, yes, the license for CarPlay transfers to subsequent owners (like the license to the software that controls the CD player).

In 2019+ BMWs, the subsequent owners would have to pay the yearly fee.

Itâ(TM)s only not part of the residual when the switch to the pay-per-year model (in the 2019 model year). Because the $80 per year fee is paid on top of the lease payment.

Thatâ(TM)s what makes the new, pay-per-year method more expensive than the $300 one-time-few method. And yet BMW is claiming the opposite.

Right now it absolute is part of the residual. Right now in BMWs, CarPlay is an optional feature (despite that on most other cars CarPlay is included as a standard feature). Think of it like an optional sunroof. The leasee pays part of that cost just like he pays for part of the car in general.

My current car has CarPlay. If I sell the car to someone else, she gets CarPlay, too. Just like she gets the sunroof I paid extra for. It's part of the car. CarPlay isn't a service (like satellite radio, for instance). No one is coming to lock the sunroof shut in my car when I sell it. BMW will lock CarPlay, though.

No one else charges a yearly fee for CarPlay. My wife's near-poverty-spec Honda came with CarPlay, and it'll work years down the road even though we don't pay Honda anything for it.

They says that for leases, the 'pay per year' method is cheaper, but let's boil that down.

On a three year least, with the 'pay per year' method, you'll pay $0 for your first year and $80 for each of your next two years. So $160 total.

If you leased the car with the one-time $300 fee, you don't pay $300. You pay Sales Price minus Residual. And the residual on some of these cars is up to ~60% of sales price. So lets say that the residual on a BMW is 58%, that means Car Play would have cost you $300* 0.42 = $126! Still cheaper! You'd have to have a residual less than 47% for the new method to be worth it.

How do 'other phones' deal with the reality that battery output drops after a few years? Their solution is to simply stop providing updates after a year and a half after the phones first went on sale. After the 'other phone' starts misbehaving too much, the owners junk them and get a new phone.

That's a much worse solution than giving degraded performance during intensive tasks to ensure the phone doesn't randomly shut off.

Remember that I picked a '$25k watch' as an extreme example, not as some standard-bearer that should be upheld.

iPhones being more mainstream than luxury watches is to be expected, though. iPhones cost less than 4% of said watch, which puts them in the grasp of a lot more people. Also, iPhones (and phones in general) are a lot more conspicuous than or most expensive things. Can you really tell a $5k men's suit from a $700 suit? or high-end shoes? Maybe if you really look at them, or were already a fan of the brand.

There are enough people in the world to whom spending $25k on a watch is like a regular person spending $100 on a watch.

Also, luxury watches tend to last for decades and don't depreciate as much as a lot of other consumer goods do. It's not uncommon to wear a watch for 30 years and then pass it down to your children.

Personally, I'd never spend $25k on a watch unless I was super-loaded, but I wouldn't mind spending $5k-$10k on such a watch, if it was of sufficient quality and timelessness. Hell, the Omega Speedmaster Professional was first produced in the '50s and was the first watch worn on the moon. They are still made today (but with slightly different internals). To some people, it's pretty cool to own a piece of that heritage and be able to look at it every day.

Don't forget that the average cost of an engagement ring in the US is like $6,000. And those don't even tell the time!

The writer of the 'article' doesn't seem to understand a few things.

1) The entire 'luxury goods' industry exists. Long after $5 quartz watches were introduced, you can still buy yourself a $25k Rolex and enjoy it. Fancy plates and real silverware don't function any differently than Corning Ware and Oneida. Yet they still exist.

2) Think of how often a typical cell-phone using person uses his/her phone. How many times a day does said person interact with his/her phone? Two thousand?

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Based on that, if you have the phone for two years and it's valueless after that (which is not the case), then to a lot of people it's worth spending extra money on a 'premium' device that works a lot lot better than cheaper devices that are slow and you have to reboot constantly. That's only $0.0004 (or 0.04 Cents) per touch different than a cheap cell phone. Or, $1 per DAY. For someone that uses his cell phone a lot, $1 per day to have a reliable device that will be quick and snappy and not need rebooting constantly, that's enough.

3) Some people just like having the latest and greatest gadgets. That's fine.

In short, the OP doesn't understand how anyone would live different than the way he is living now.

If you're only buying $200-$300 phones, you can afford to get a new one every few months. Buying $700-$800 phones changes the equation a little bit.

Or you can just pay off the phone and enjoy using their money. It's just like a department store offering you their store credit card with 0% interest. If you don't have the will power to walk away when it's time, then it certainly isn't their fault. But, yes, Apple's plan with the iPhone Upgrade Program is to make it extremely easy for customers to come in and get the newest model phone. At any point you can just keep the phone you have and walk away. There's no mandatory lock-in, so I don't see what the problem is.

If the lender is paying Apple less than the phone, why would I (as the consumer) care? The loan is exactly 0%. I can either but the phone for $X right now or I can pay $(X/24) over the next 24 months. Either way, it's the same money out of my pocket and I can use my money on anything else (including investing it) in the meantime.

The guy I was responding to said that he always buys outright, so if he had the cash to pay for it outright, he could easily take the cash, put it in an interest-accruing savings account and pay for the 0% loan out of that account. And he would come out financially ahead. My sole point was that at 0% it is financially inefficient to use your own money instead of someone else's. He thinks always paying cash outright is the financially prudent thing to do - and it's not.