Comment by chacham15

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own part of it and lease the rest. This leads to the price of the object being higher than what you would actually pay if you were going to only lease it. In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them, we would still be fine because nobody would pay full price for a tractor every month, but rather only what would make sense economically.