Also Predicted Live On Last Week’s PC Perspective Podcast
The PCPer Podcast broadcast live on February 4th is now two for two in predicting the next ideas coming from the computer industry, one good and one completely awful. The first was that Microsoft needs to rehire their QA team instead of inflicting their customers with essentially untested software and patches. There is now a Engineering Quality Czar at Microsoft, and hopefully will also get budget to hire a team of testers. The second was not so good, the idea that we would soon see a company offering rental laptops; not rent-to-own but only to rent.
We’d hoped that laptop sellers would also hear our opinion of the idea of LaaS, which was very negative, but alas that is not the case. HP will now rent you a gaming laptop, ranging from “$50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080“.
In case this is unclear, we consider this a horrifically bad idea.
The monthly fee does not go towards one day owning the laptop, it is a straight out rental and at a cost that means in less than two years a victim of this LaaS scam will have already paid more than the laptop is worth. The only good side is that since the laptop is still owned by HP, your monthly fee gets you yearly hardware upgrades, next-day replacements, 24/7 support, and an ongoing warranty. Of course this assumes that there is any new hardware released to upgrade the laptop with, and that it would actually be available for anyone other than LLM companies.
If you were curious as to what exactly the service is like, and you shouldn’t because it will just encourage others to try this scam out, you can try it for 30 days. If you go over that time limit by even a moment, you will have to pay a cancellation fee ranging from $550 for the Victus 15 to $1,430 for the OMEN. You have to keep paying monthly fees for a full year before cancellation is free.
