Obligatory "You will own nothing and be happy"

$71.99/mo for 12 months ($863.88) for the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 DUAL White OC Edition, when it retails for around $600. SIGN ME UP!

"Yes but the upgrade to the next gen model is basically free because I'm paying the same price anyway" /s
- Boy, I can't wait to pay a grand total of ~1700 dollars to get a FREE upgrade when the next gen arrives! Totally worth it!!

I thought for sure this was fake but it sadly isn't. Really should take up smoking and drinking again to get off this ride sooner.

Buying alcohol and cigarettes is dumb. For just $99.99 a month we'll give you 30 whole cigarettes and a six pack of beer 100% for free.
- The Addiction Plus subscription
- Where I live that might actually be a good deal on the cigarettes. Haven't bought one in a while though so I'm not sure.
Don't do that to yourself. Not only are you worth more than that, but doing so would only bond you to two more hypercapitalist shitboots than you already are.

Stay strong. Spite is a wonderful motivator, if nothing else.
- Something something don't die for your depression, makes redacted by law

To be fair some of these rentals are cheap enough to be worth it.

The last time I checked, it would cost me about 15 dollars to rent a vr headset for a month!

Definitely worth renting VR headsets because a looot of people abandon them after a while.
- I might just do this to see if I like them. 500 to 1000 is a bit steep to see if you even want to invest.
- Seconded, friend gave me his Vive after upgrading, I used the thing for about two months and now maybe once a year if someone wants to try VR for the first time.

I always wonder how these places don't get ripped off left and right by people just making the first payment and bailing with the hardware but i suppose they probably just make up for it from the handful of suckers that actually keep paying for stuff.

I suppose if you could put custom firmware on the card, you could have host-side software that talks to something remote and to the card and has to activate the GPU each session.

I think that the issue here is less the technical barriers and more "the financial side doesn't seem to make a lot of sense".
Is it worth long term damage to your credit for a $700 piece of hardware? For many, probably not.
- these types of "rent-a-center" businesses don't exactly target people with credit scores that can be damaged much (it can only go so low), these are the kind of places people who are extremely irresponsible with their money go to get things because they literally have no other option.
- A good GPU hasn't been $700 for a very long time.

I doubt that leasing physical possession of a GPU makes much sense unless there's a serious market for secondhand GPUs. Then the leasing party can transfer the thing to someone else who wants it down the line, and you can derive benefit from that reuse. But that demand doesn't really exist today. Maybe if the rate of increase of performance on GPUs stagnates.

It can make sense to do something today like vast.ai, where one buys access to a remote GPU, if one has "bursty" needs. Like, maybe someone needs access to a high-end GPU for AI stuff, but only on a sporadic basis.

Most people have a pc because they don't want subscription for anything...

What fresh hell is this?

LaaS: Life as a Service

I would love to lease if it brought more value but as currently structured it's trash. EVGA step up was good for this buyer.

If you lease something, you make periodic payments; i.e. it isn't free.

So we've come full circle and reinvented eMachines?

I'm actually the target audience for this - or I would be if I had the money for it. I get tired of having to buy and configure new hardware every couple of years just to keep up with new software.

Good news, Moore's law and dennard scaling is pretty much over. We could (in a better system) buy for the next decade. Unfortunately this is not profitable so it won't happen