On some level you already know your Apple gadgets are linked nodes on a network with your most sensitive data coursing through it. If you’re like many users, your app states, documents, health information, photos—possibly including nudes—and maybe your payment and banking codes, along with the passwords that unlock them, all exist nowhere and everywhere, because their real home is an Apple server. Incorporate a new device into the network, and with a few button presses all that data will be accessible on the replacement, and you’ll try not to think about how you didn’t exactly open up a safe and retrieve it manually. But Apple reportedly considered a feature that would have skipped even those meager button presses—delivering a device with your life already accessible on it as soon as you unboxed it. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, a forthcoming gadget-leasing plan (because remember: the future of tech is owning nothing) may allow users to pay monthly fees for all eternity and receive perpetually new gadgets in cycles from 12-36 months long. An option to pre-load new devices with the users data won’t be available, but Gurman says it was in the works for a while.
He says it would have been called a “white-glove component,” and if the user opted into it, it would have arrived “preloaded with all of your data via your iCloud backup.” Gurman says this would take away the burden of setting up new devices, which he calls a “pain in the neck.” Do people really feel this way? I find setting up new devices to be therapeutic, but I don’t get new devices very often like I assume Gurman does.
