tl/dr:
the problem is the buyers don't understand that the hardware cost is included in their monthly payments.
Financial education needs to be part of basic high school curriculum.

Longer answer below:

When the buyer originally signed up they agreed to a 12-month subscription.
The cost of the hardware was baked into that subscription price.
Seller offers to supply upgraded Hardware before the 12-month period expires as long as buyer agrees to maintain the subscription for an additional 12 months. That's the same 12-month period over which the seller would ordinarily expect to receive payments for the new Hardware.

In the case of the upgrade after 6 months the seller eats the cost of the unpaid portion of the original Hardware.
The seller expected to recover the cost of the original Hardware over a 12-month period. But they only received payments for that original hardware for 6 months. If the hardware is in good condition the seller can put it in a new box and use it for a one month trial. There's a lot less value there than sitting there and collecting rents for another 6 months.

They're not charging the buyer for that unpaid portion of the original Hardware cost. That's free.

For corporate customers a remotely managed solution is the best.
The companybcertainly doesn't want to assume that every user carrying a laptop understands and applies in good security practices.
As far as Microsoft spying on corporate secrets, that's what the company pays it's lawyers for.

Outside of that use case if you're worried about somebody stealing your laptop and getting your data, encrypt your boot partition and any other storage with your secrets on it.
Lock it as soon as you leave your desk. Power It Off as soon as you're done working etc etc
If somebody steals it you don't heed to remotely wipe it.

This was for invoicing one of the big three auto manufacturers

As with any other coding project the computer science part of it was the comparatively easy part
Correctly understanding the requirements, in this case properly interpreting the contracts and regulations... not so easy

of their precious bodily fluids

ublock*
Stupid voice to text

If they turned off you block origin I wouldn't even notice.
My employer's intranet sites should not have spam that needs to be blocked

I have never met anyone who uses Edge for surfing public websites

oblig. xkcd

I've got a house full of old Lenovo machines
The workstations run kubuntu and the servers run nas4free (bsd)
They're cheap and they do job reliably.

When one company pulls a stunt like this you can boycott.
But you can boycott everybody.

Turnabout is fair play.

All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote? ...

I think they made a movie about that with Matthew Broderick

I also remember migrating from iTunes to Foobar2000. It was a PITA but I've never looked back

Once upon a time I posted engineering job ads in usenet news groups. Engineers looking for jobs responded, I interviewed them and hired some; they performed well. We all worked hard and made a lot of money. And yes, this was a couple of years into the eternal September.

Try that or try something similar to that (uucp still exists if you want to be pedantic) today & see what happens.

By now ad blocking & spyware blocking is an all out arms race.
The bot filtering and AI blocking race has barely begun.
It can get worse--much, much worse, and it will. We've barely started.

Risk is something that *might* happen.