I want to buy something and it will come with a certain amount of updates. It will be one fixed price and keep working after that certain period of updates.
I don’t see how that’s a “boomer” complaint lol I’m a millennial and don’t know anyone that’s excited to pay monthly fees for something they already bought
I blame iPhone and Android apps that required developers to keep paying a $100 minimum yearly fee to keep an app in the App Store.
There were tons $1-$5 apps in the early days of the stores, but 3-4 years in they switched to either freemium subscriptions or adware (or ad ransom models). Usually as publishers bought out indie devs, if they just didn’t copy them anyway.
Most boomers don’t even use any paid software aside from Windows and an antivirus they got tricked into buying
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not only that, but people usually use boomer, in this context, to say that the complaint is stupid, or selfish, or something
the gradual loss of ownership is a real fucking issue
“Boomer” has lost all meaning. It has just become an empty counter for when you disagree with someone but you lack the emotional intelligence to have an actual discussion about something other the superficial.
In the future, you’ll own nothing and like it!
And no gen-Z is happy about this model or pushing its use. It’s mostly being pushed by Gen-X and Boomer executives as a further mode of profit extraction in our rentier economic system.
Sure, we’ll just wait for the gen-Z executives to roll it al back then right? It’ll never happen, this is a money thing, not a generation thing.
that’s the point I was trying to make
There was a joke about “rethinking the Microsoft model” in a 2005 episode of The Office. The move to subscription based software has been in the works for 25 years or more.
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I’ve always blamed Adobe for the subscription mess, and that started in the early 00’s.
My vintage copy of Adobe CS6 needs knee surgery at this point.
It’s because a lot of boomers own their homes and the concept of rent is foreign to them.
I really don’t understand why people call themselves homeowners when they are paying off a 30 year mortgage.
Feels like rent with extra steps.
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I pirated everything before they decided to make everything rental only.
I assumed when I got older I’d be able to afford the software and they’d get there due.
But now they want everything to be rental and I’m not down for that.
So you are claiming the only reason that you are not paying for the software that you were previously pirating is that they switched to a paid subscription? Right
Hmm, immediately call me out for being an assjole without asking if I own all the software that’s not rental?
Go troll somebody else, I don’t have time for people like you.
I didn’t call you an asshole lol I just find it hard to believe someone would not just continue to pirate the software they already pirate if that remained an option
And good and blocked bye-bye
When i was young and broke there were games that I’ve pirated. Played, and loved, and bought them redundantly to make up for it.
I wouldn’t have played the game if I didn’t.
I wish game demos were still popular.
You guessed wrong, this is common.
: Side eyes Adobe CS6 Suite and Ableton:
This is me. I grew up “choose between bills and food” poor, and found alternate solutions to enjoy things. Figured that once I had the disposable income I’d stop. Sure, I did pay my way for a long time too. The thing that fucked me off the most was Netflix telling me that I couldn’t share my account with a student friend of mine. I’m paying to be able to watch on 4 screens simultaneously, who the fuck is Netflix to dictate where those screens are located?
I still pay for stuff, if I feel that the service, software, what have you, deserves my money. I’ve paid enough for Netflix through the years so anything there is just me collecting my due.
Aren’t the blue checks part of a subscription model?
No subscriptions, thank you. I straight away turn down even free trial periods even if they are offered as a compensation for a CS ticket.
And when Strava automatically set a bunch of users to Premium for a while, hence showing a “paid user” icon for those users (nice marketing trick though), I removed my account.
No.Subsciptions.
Certainly not a Boomer complain.
The most boomer thing is getting suckered into subscription services. This is like an upside down meme. I got no strings on me. And I’m a real boy. * Pinocchio
Picard would be ashamed.
“Of course you can use our software with a one time purchase!”
“We’ve been adding new features! To access our new features just subscribe to our premium subscription!”
“You’re still a premium member, and you have full access to our premium plan, but some of our options have changed, and to make the most of what we can offer you can subscribe to our premium gold+ plan! Try out a free 30 day trial!”
“Put your young in the payment grinder and your life and survival will not be put on the countdown timer! You need us to live, we need you to understand.”
The latest season of Black Mirror had an Episode just like this.
The beginning of the episode: “Rashida Jones AND Chris O’Dowd?! Two of my favorite comedy people! This seems like it might be a fun episode.”
The end of the episode: “Should I bother cleaning my gun before I put it in my mouth?”
Boomer complaint? Why can’t I smoke an after dinner cigarette at the restaurant in peace without people whining at me to get up and go outside? And what is it with all this “rap music” on the radio? I’ll rather take Chet Baker any day of the week.
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Why don’t kids just walk into the store, shake hands with a manager, and get a job immediately?
Subbed!
It’s like you don’t get the idea at all!
Shit, they got me!
Not even just software. Fucking everything. They are making car options a subscription.
And there are people who just pay for it, which blows my mind. Companies wouldn’t do it if there wasn’t money to be had. So now we get nickel and dimed so these corporations can get a steady stream of income rather than providing good quality products.
Apps are really notorious for it. What used to be a 10$ app now they expect subscriptions that amount to 60$ or more a year with no real noteworthy changes in service.
Calorie counting apps, for example, have been doing the same thing for over a decade now with little change besides cosmetic upgrades and “AI”.
They are making car options a subscription.
They’re making money on this too, regardless of if you subscribe.
BMW announces that heated seats will be available in their cars with a subscription model. That’s to say, you buy your car “without” heated seats, and then for when you need it, you can just pay a subscription to “unlock” it for as long as you need. Once summer comes, you can stop.
Caveats:
- BMW saves money by streamlining their production process. By removing the option to select heated or unheated seats, they’re making production easier and subsequently cheaper.
- They’re still fucking charging you for those seats. It’s not like they’re going to give away heated seats for free and bank on people using that subscription to recoup the costs. You already pay the full prices for those heated seats, and then they charge you extra while trying to phrase it like you’re coming out on top on this deal.
Want to heat your car seats? That’s a suspension. Want to use your car’s radio? Another subscription. Get a higher mileage count to the gallon? Subscription.
This model should be straight-up illegal on environmental grounds alone. It’s particularly egregious for electric car batteries.
Some manufacturers will make models with nominally different batteries, but in reality the same batteries are used throughout. There might be a model with three different battery options; 400, 300, and 200 mile range options. But the 200 mile range one doesn’t actually have a battery half the size. It has a 400 mile battery with half of its capacity locked out by software controls. That means the 200 mile range option vehicles are hauling around hundreds of pounds of extra weight for literally no reason at all. Such cars are pointlessly burning energy every mile they drive, hauling around extra battery that serves them no purpose.
This stuff should be straight-up illegal. It should not be legal to sell a vehicle with software-locked equipment. Want to sell trim levels with different features? Fine. Quit being a cheap bastard and actually build vehicles with different equipment levels. Don’t build them all with the high-end options and then force those who buy the cheaper trims to burn money for the rest of that vehicle’s hauling around equipment they’ll never use.
If only we lived in a country that didn’t have exploitative plutocrats running the government.
This is my fear with dish and clothes washers manufacturers wanting to have wifi built into them. They’ve already gotten people used to using clothes and dish detergent in the form of little pods. I think appliance manufacturers look at printer companies and their ink prices and want a piece of that action. They want to play the same game. I’m sure Whirlpool would love it if you could only buy laundry detergent from them.
But in order to do that, they need to have their devices be internet-enabled. The printer companies figured this out. Third party ink manufacturers figure out ways to get past manufacturer lock-outs. So printers need to be internet enabled to allow patches that will disable new third party ink cartridges.
In my opinion, this is the real reason we see so many manufacturers trying to shove IoT and wifi connections into home appliances. Sure, selling your data to data brokers is a nice minor revenue stream. But the real prize is using that wifi to lock you in to buying obscenely expensive consumables for your dish washer, clothes washer, etc. Even fridges are at risk of this due to the water filters that many fridges have built in to them. Same with dryers.
The manufacturers of major appliances are pushing like crazy to connect these things to the net. Their official line is that they want this for consumer-friendly reasons. Most cynics say it’s just a way to sell your data. I however think the real goal is to turn every home appliance into a vendor-locked piece of garbage that requires consumables priced like printer ink.
Great point of view and yet another strong reason not to just allow internet connections on every damn thing. One other huge reason - being forced to accept brand new (legally binding!) licensing agreements, long after the device has been paid for and installed.
Roku was in the news somewhat recently for auto-installing an update that required users to accept a new license agreement to continue to use the device they’d paid for and had been using up until that point. And that license wasn’t a trivial change, it required the user to agree to forced arbitration!
In other words, in a very real sense, they came into the house and modified the TV (not just the cheap little streaming devices), then turned around and said “Want to keep using this thing you’ve made a part of your daily life? That you already paid us for? Well, fine you can, but - we don’t want any of you to ever sue us, so agree not to or fuck you. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s your TV, just say yes and get on with it”.
Wild stuff! And I guarantee it gets worse before it gets better. We need high quality FOSS hardware badly, I really hope we see that start to take off in a bigger way. I’m not super optimistic though, hardware being just a lot harder to iterate on.
Cory Doctorow wrote a fantastic story about this. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wandyezj/reference/master/unauthorized-bread.pdf
If I ever end up in a situation where I can only get ‘smart’ appliances, I’ll just start washing my laundry at a lake or something.
Fuck it, if they do this I’ll go stinky as a protest. I’ll stink so bad that the politicians will be forced to regulate.
Go stand in front of a government building and spread your disgusting armpits. Use a fan to direct the smell there, or even better, go inside.
Reminds me of how British politicians were forced to act on pollution of the river Thames because the Parliament building got unbearably stinky.
Of course they’d act first when it inconveniences them. Ugh!
Here in Sweden there’s one thing all our parties agree on; drugs are bad and anyone who takes them are morally bankrupt. According to sewage water tests in parliament, plenty of our parliamentarians are coked up on the job.
Our drug policies are super strict, to the point that people are dying because of them. Our ministry of health has recommended that we relax them a little, and for some reason this is the hill all our parties are willing to die on.
You’re nearly there already! 🤢
If they make a washing machine that requires a subscription to their pods, I will switch to washing my clothes in a bucket using the cheapest detergent Aldi have.
I buy things that are a one-time purchase sometimes entirely because I was given the option.
they just need to outlaw subscription based services on services that don’t need it.
And no continuous support is not a valid subscription reason, if you want to charge support separate that’s fair to do but this pay 60$ a year “because it’s a continuous development” needs to go away.
Same with the “pay a rent for a building”, it’s just money drain. Being a landlord should not be allowed to be for profit, and should be heavily regulated. If you wanna rent? Sure, but at max it should be equivalent to costs the building has, and restricted to only apartment complexes. So annoying that you can’t find property anymore to actually /own/ because a handful of rental companies can just write a blank check and buy it all.
if you want to charge support separate that’s fair to do but this pay 60$ a year “because it’s a continuous development” needs to go away
Can i pay extra to not have continuous updates that often breaks shit?
I wouldn’t mind renting software, if only subscription-based software was such that you only paid the money for the subscription. It would be a fine way of using something for a short term, and a fine way to get some sort of guarantee that the software is maintained.
But you’ll also end up paying with your data that they sell out.
Maybe for the short term, but there is software you use every day, for years. Some android apps I have been using since 2014.
Reverse question: would you maintain a program that you wrote 11 years ago if it wasn’t making you money?
I do that, so I can say “yes” with conviction.
Open source, I assume? Extremely laudable and I hope you don’t have to make big financial compromises for that.
Yes, and I feel pretty privileged that I can make a living with stuff like that instead of making money for some heartless corporation that doesn’t ultimately care about anything except for money.
No, but I also don’t expect that as a user. It is also fine if the developer makes version 2.0 and I can decide to buy the new version or not. Before the internet this was pretty much how it worked, a new version came on a new floppy or disc you’d buy in a store.
Then again, application software wasn’t cheap. Given inflation, would you pay a thousand bucks for a lifetime license of a piece of software that didn’t get any updates ever?
How is that a boomer complaint? It’s basic. Microsoft Word should be buy once for 3 computers, as it always was until subs took over.
We can’t even read the news anymore without a sub.
I like the use of the word rent for this.
I think it depends on the type of software. Subscriptions do make sense for software that requires regular updates, e.g. something tax related, where you need it updated with the latest regulations every year. Basically for anything that won’t be useful a year from the purchase date without feature updates.
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Gatekeeping the news? No ty.
Do you think the news just appears on webpages for us to consume?
Particularly in the case of investigative journalism, there is a skill involved in writing the stories, and it consumes the time and effort of many people.
Charging money for your work is not “gatekeeping.” It’s how you keep eating.
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Nah, absolutely not. Putting a profit incentive on the news is how we end up with how the news currently is - reaction-bait with the sole purpose of driving engagement and views to generate ad revenue, instead of actual, unbiased, honest journalism.
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I wouldn’t say it was just that. News also got worse on e.g. government supported TV channels in countries that have them. Part of the problem is the regurgitation of social media on the news and also news organizations being afraid of social media backlash. Another part is politicians not giving interviews to organizations that ask them hard questions, that one was probably better in the past because there were more limited numbers of news sources.
If you want narrow readership. Or a society that bases its current events knowledge almost strictly on headlines instead of article content.
People can’t afford groceries. Rent. There is a profound increase in garbage both along highways and in rural locations because it’s the first utility to be sacrificed in the name of survival.
Paying $x per month to dig deeper in on a headline, while the above is happening, isn’t going to occur on any grand scale.
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The same people complaining about software subscriptions also complained that shrink wrapped software was too expensive and didn’t get free updates for life.
