And they are using paid influencers to promote said debt trap to those that don't know any better, particularly children.

Probably the most insidious part of this to me. Seeing those clips of "influencers" pushing the idea of convincing your parents to get you a rental PC. Disgusting.

A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan

Literally a lower monthly payment, lower total paid and you end up owning a computer if you finance your computer with a predatory payday loan than with this rental program (per GN's math)

Edit: at $259/mo that's already $3108/year or 2-3x the cost of a good midrange DIY PC. Also at an incredible 36% interest rate because this hypothetical individual purchased a $3000 computer on a credit card and only pays a bit more than the minimum towards it, that's only $177/mo on a 24 month loan. Or if you just got a $1500 computer (a pretty dang good computer!) on a 12% APR personal loan (pretty common from banks) you only pay $133/mo for 12 month, own the computer and only pay a total of $1600

The only way to make this rental program look at all good is if you are literally using the computer to make money but have very littlemoney upfront for a decent enough computer to do the same job (basically the "rent it for 1 month and win a fortnite tournament" fantasy one paid promoter suggested) except, oh look, you can buy a laptop from Dell for $520 or less than two months rental cost if you really don't have the budget and then use that to make your money to fuel your future baller PC purchase. And I can assure you, that business laptop can run Fortnite if that's your concern, because Fortnite will run on any potato PC if you turn the prettiness down enough.

Edit 2: Also I just found a similar laptop in 1 minute on ebay for $255 to further kill that "spend your allowance to rent a computer for a month to win a fortnite tournament" fantasy

Just FYI, as per their own terms you can cancel up until it ships.

I like my arctic liquid freezer aio. Wanted a simple one.

Same boat - just ordered an AIO directly from them and see the "we're building your pc" emails. Hoping there's not shenanigans with this.

Same. My jaw dropped. Absolutely loved it.

Yeah... i had to replay it too. He was quite upset.

Steve has no patience for people or company that lack empathy and abuse people.

Remind me his reaction to the email of Artesian CEO, he was quite upset too.

I mean, I could see if they tried to make this rent-to-own over 2-3 years. At half the price they're offering.

But renting... where you're paying over the entirety of the price in a single year, is fucking insane.

If renting, and updating it every 2 years, then for like 1/4th of the price then sure. I could see it being promoted how they are. Rent out older stock for 50% retail to at least get some value out of it while allowing people to pay ~$30 a month for a decent computer. (and then you could "upgrade" the lower tier with this to end up recouping 75% of retail over 4 years.)

But who the fuck is paying 10% of the cost a month to borrow an okay computer, even ignoring the full month cancelation fee, and ridiculous contract. (which is... ignoring a LOT.)

It is sad to see NZXT lowered to this as I used to have a decent view of them. They make some nice cases. CAM kinda lowered that view a bit, but I was in the beta for that and got a free water cooler out of it so I could overlook that (it’s improved a lot since beta, though it gathering data is still not great it’s less horrible than it was.). And pushing their own not as great products for the prebuilts still seemed okay for prebuilts for those scared to build on their own. But this is just... too much to overlook. Wild.

And looking into it as GN has done, makes it clear that's only the very tip of the scam.