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HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops (pcgamer.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the you-will-own-nothing dept.
HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price.

The service ranges 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. At current sale prices, subscribers would exceed the cost of buying the laptop outright within 16 to 19 months; at MSRP, that window stretches to roughly 25 months. In exchange for giving up ownership, subscribers get yearly hardware upgrades, next-day replacements, 24/7 support, and an ongoing warranty. There is a 30-day trial period, but cancelling in the second month triggers steep early termination fees -- $550 for the Victus 15 and $1,430 for the Omen Max 16. Cancellation becomes free only after the 13th month. HP also offers accessories like the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless headset as add-on rentals for $8 a month.
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HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops More

HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops

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  • Subscription, or lease? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flibbidyfloo ( 451053 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:06PM (#65982442)
    With such steep and restrictive early termination fees, I don't think this qualifies as a "subscription" - it's a lease, like you'd have for a new car. Even the most hardcore gamers don't buy a new laptop every year, and new hardware releases don't require such, so this seems like a terrible deal.

    • It's a terrible deal. The only thing worse is buying a lemon of a gaming laptop and being stuck dealing with the normal short term warranty. Otherwise, if you even financed at 10-20% interest you would probably be better off.

      I hope they at least cover accidental damage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hwstar ( 35834 )

        1. A manacle, chain, and 100 Kiligram ball.

        2. Contract of adhesion written on flypaper.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      LTT looked at it and it does seem like a shitty deal. The cost isn't far off buying a new laptop every two years, and of course if you do that you can probably sell your old one.

    • Re:Subscription, or lease? (Score:4, Informative)

      by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:35PM (#65982486)

      When you lease something, you end up with ownership. With these HP rentals, there's zero path at all to ownership. Thus, it's a subsrciption through and through.

      • There are lots of leases without a purchase option.

        • Today I learned.

          Where I come from, lease basically means you buy something, most probably a vehicle, with a loan. Once you have paid back the loan, you own the thing.

          Turns out for most of people it's just another word for rent. Go figure.

          • Yea. In colloquial usage there isn't much difference between lease, rent, subscription, etc.

            Leasing a commercial space is like what you think of as rent. It's a long term contract for the right to use the space. With no permanent transfer of ownership in the agreement. Leasing equipment is also handled this way.

            Short term, you can rent a chainsaw, a carpet cleaner, or an apartment. Every month you pay your rent and you get to stay. If you have a long term agreement, then it's technically a lease.

            Rent to own

            • In these parts all of the leases are structured as ending with ownership. However, most cars are returned to the dealership before that. People either get bored of them and want newer ones, or the smart ones return theirs before they're due for the first major overhaul. So funnily enough, in practical terms, the lease is a rent.

              The dealership gets a discount on any work to be done on the used cars because of the volume and ties to the manufacturer, and they get to sell the car a second time for another prof

      • Re:Subscription, or lease? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by anoncoward69 ( 6496862 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:52PM (#65982628)
        I've never heard of a lease that ends with definite ownership. Pretty much all apartment rentals these days are "leases" you don't own your apartment after your 12 month lease is up. Yes car leases usually have an option to buy out the car at the end but you're not getting that car for "free" at the end of the lease. You're basically going to be paying used car prices to buy it. Dealers usually offer this cause it saves them the hassle of having to clean/restore the car to put it on their used car lot to sell or put up for auction.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by klubar ( 591384 )

          Commercial leases are often FMV or $1 buyout which determine what happens at lease end.

          A Fair Market Value (FMV) lease is a flexible financing agreement -- often called an operating lease or "true lease" -- where you pay for the use of equipment over a fixed term rather than paying to own it. At the end of the term, you have the option to purchase the asset at its current "fair market value," return it, or upgrade to newer technology.

          A $1 buyout lease (also known as a capital lease or finance lease) is a le

      • How is this moderated as informative? Leasing has nothing to do with ownership. You appear to be confusing $1 buyout leases (common with computer equipment) with......leases ending up with just owning things? That's not at all how leases work. Definitely not the mot common type that individuals are exposed to (cars).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stripes ( 3681 )

        Interesting, in the USA leases normally do not end with you owning the item. A typical house lease ends with you moving out or “extending” the lease for another month (or several), or getting another year’s lease frequently at a newer higher price. A car lease tends to have a buy out clause where you can purchase the car for a set price which normally ends up being above the “blue book” value at that time (the car manufacturer and bank tend to have better guesses about that v

    • Re: Subscription, or lease? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:36PM (#65982488)

      A lease gives you the right, but not the obligation, to acquire the good for a small nominal price (for example, E extra monthly payments) at the end of the lease.

      Renting does not.

      This seems to be renting.

      HP also offers leases, but for Pro grade PCs, for companies.

      • It seems that the meaning of the word âoeleaseâ must be shifting in some places to imply a capital lease (full life of product or bargain purchase option, therefore consubstantial with a sale on an installment plan). Historically it has just meant a rental agreement.
    • The best result of this I could foresee is a deal on some refurbs at Microcenter in a few years?

    • Step 1: Claim a shortage on GPUs, Memory, and processors.
      Step 2: Only make high-spec laptops available via rental / lease.
      Step 3: Collect tears along with lease payments.
      Step 4: Frolicking executives / hookers and blow

    • Yeah I am super wary about this sort of thing. I still feel burnt after a decade ago going on a phone plan that offered free phone upgrades after a year. Instead they cancelled the plan a month before the year, and sent me a $500 bill to cover the rest of the phone. Not what I agreed to, and I took the telco to the small claims court and got a full refund of the plan instead. (The competition regulator (here in australia) ended up fining the telco over it, apparently they where doing this to everyone)

  • Horrible terms (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:07PM (#65982444) Homepage

    I was going to say that might make sense for short term needs. If you need a better PC for a 6 month job, do this.

    But they dissallow the only sensible use for the customer, requiring a year long minimum.

    It also illustrates total ignorance of how these kinds of rentals make a profit - people think they want it for 6 months, but end up keeping it for 5 years.

    How many people actually end subscriptions when they stop needing them?

  • And you will be "happy".

    There is no other alternative - Margret Thatcher, former UK Prime Minister

    This is where we are heading folks.

    Take the time to think about this and let it sink in.

    This also may be time to do some thinking about how to live off-grid if this lack of owning anything becomes reality. Become a Slab City refusenik?

  • Leasing is a better option, because it gives you the right, but not the obligation, to acquire the good at the end of the lease time.

    Renting ceratin things, like GAMING laptops, can also make sense, because laptos have high wear and tear, and because, due to the limits inherent to the form factor, they become obsolete for the intended purpose (gaming) quite quickly

    So, in the middle of the RAMpocalypse, with bonker prices, we have another option.

    More options are good, if you can do the math to figure out, in

    • Re:Renting vs Leasing vs buying (Score:4, Informative)

      by azander ( 786903 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @12:59PM (#65982532) Homepage

      My father, years ago (mid 1990's) leased Dell desktops for his law office. He did the 4 year lease they offered at the time. When it came time to upgrade after 2 (as part of the lease) I had to spend 4 days backing up and clearing drives to make sure nothing private left the office. That is 4 days down time. That is 4 days at $50+/hr. Once the drives were clean we sent the systems back. Dell wanted them back and promised next day delivery for the new ones. 8 days later they arrived.

      Reminder: LAW office.

      Once everything was back up and running, I looked over the details of each system. The upgrade? Newer hardware? No. Better hardware? No. SAME HARDWARE, including chip serial numbers in many cases (The law office documented EVERYTHING with pictures, inside and out). They changed out the drives, and the cases but put most of the same hardware back in the new cases.

      Let us just say that the next hardware was purchased (buy, not lease) from a different vendor on Dell's dime, and was significantly better hardware, that lasted more than the next decade until he retired. Hardware was running Windows 7 easily by the time it was scrapped and the only reason it wasn't running Windows 8 was that by that time the new License agreements meant that Lawyers should (legally) never use a Microsoft product again.

      Read and understand the EULAs. It will scare you what you are giving up to these companies even when purchasing.

    • Leasing often makes more sense for companies, saving time and or money in the long run. Lease an office printer, and you don't have to worry about maintenance or toner. I don't think that makes as much sense for consumers.
      • That's not why leasing matters to companies. Leasing is how you turn capex into opex. If you need a further explanation on why that matters you don't know enough to understand the response.
        • I wasn't looking to get that far into the weeds with it. Comment for general audience, not accountants.

  • Of course, they're much less upfront about their printer rentals. You can 'buy' the printers at the store, yet pay ongoing fees in the form of being locked into buying supplies from HP at inflated prices. Their laptop rental sca.. er, scheme, is at least openly advertised as a rental.

    Snarkasm aside, it occurs to me that the market for these laptops might have significant overlap with the market for payday loan services.

  • I still re call when Hewlett Packard was known for top of the line quality. Expensive but the best of the best equipment.
    • The quality part of HP was sold off long ago as Agilent. I'm pretty sure the HP that exists today is the marketing department that's echo chambered itself to death cause even HP's marketing was decent back in the day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suutar ( 1860506 )

        First Agilent spun off with the medical stuff, and probably other general stuff (signal generators, for example). Then what was left split into Hewlett-Packard for consumer stuff (printers, laptops, etc) and HP Enterprise (for datacenter gear). Haven't paid a lot of attention since 2020; they may have split again for all I know.

  • Compare with a GPU server (Score:3)

    by votsalo ( 5723036 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @01:06PM (#65982536)

    How does renting a laptop with a GPU compare to renting a server with a GPU?

    Hetzner offers a server with a Nvidia RTX 4000 GPU and 64GB RAM + 20GB vRAM for $205/mo + $312 setup fee. If I want to rent one for a month, to experiment running LLMs, it will cost me $517. I can rent an HP laptop with a comparable GPU (but with less memory) for just $50. If I want to rent one indefinitely, the laptop is 4 times cheaper than the server.

    • Not defending HP's ludicrous rental scheme but if you're wanting to play with local LLMs the mobile chip in the laptop is going to be underpowered compared to the full sized chip in the Hetzner server. Despite the name the chip in the laptop will have far fewer compute cores and a fraction of the VRAM. It will also have more thermal throttling. If you want to play with LLMs you'd be better off just doing cloud instances with inference providers. They're often cheaper than a dedicated monthly server.

    • Please read the headline and TFS. These are GAMING laptops for rent. Not AI/EDeveloper laptops for rent. If you want to game on your hetzner server, RTT (a.k.a. ping times, latency) can be a issue, depending where you live. No such problems with a rented GAMING laptop.

      • Will HP charge me a Non-Gaming fee, if I use their gaming laptops for something other than playing games?

        You've never heard that GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are often repurposed for AI workloads?

        There is a precedence for this line of thinking: NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards [slashdot.org]. So yes, you have a point.

        I wonder if you are allowed to replace the operating system on a rented laptop.

        Every tool is a hammer, except for the screwdriver, which is also a chisel.

  • This is an "easy payment" system for people who can't afford a laptop or manage financing but still "gotta have it". The rest of the economy is adapting similarly with low-per-unit-cost small-package food, household supplies and personal items. On a total basis it's grotesque overcharge of course, and always has been.
  • Subjcet says it all.

  • This reminds me of the NZXT Flex subscription which was panned universally by literally everyone who has looked into it as a hyper expensive waste of money.

  • What are the restrictions? (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @06:30PM (#65983360) Homepage
    I heard about this, but one thing I'm confused on, how many modifications can I make to the system? Assuming they'll ship with Windows X, if I remove that and install Qubes OS, FreeBSD, or Fedora, and then run into a problem, would that be covered? What if you run into a driver issue because you changed the OS?

    I can already hear the customer service: "Sir, we shipped it with Windows 11, you removed that, we're not liable for issues now.", and how do you respond? I actually like the idea, I can see where it would work, but will you have reasonable free rein? I can see valid arguments, if you open it up and replace the memory, or install liquid metal, you're asking for a customer service beat down, but inside reasonable changes, like the OS, I wonder if that will be covered.

  • will they pull the rent a car ding and dent scam with big fees for ware and tare damage?

  • No. Just no. As someone who has suffered HP products on the past, couldn't people just hit themselves in the head with a piece of wood in preference to the nightmare that is their:
      * DRM in unusual places
      * Complete inability to make a cohesive website
      * Price gouging

  • Genuine question: does anyone have anything good to say about HP (not HPE) anymore?

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