- Joined
- Aug 25, 2012
- Messages
- 1,512
- Motherboard
- ASRock Z690 Steel Legend
- CPU
- i7-13700k
- Graphics
- Vega 56
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
Subscriptions has been the strategy a lot of tech companies have been shifting to for quite some time. Adobe does it with Creative Cloud. Microsoft does it with Office 365. BMW even turned CarPlay in to a subscription!! Wall Street loves the recurring revenues and rewards the companies that have successful subscription business models.
Personally, I despise subscriptions. I try to eliminate as many from my life as possible. It was the end users who allowed this to happen. If companies can do it and make money from it, they will continue to do it.
As for the apparent merging of iOS and macOS, I think it's a good thing. I do not think that macOS will end up being iOS. At WWDC last year, Apple clearly said that we would always be able to disable SIP and we would be able to install apps outside of the App Store on macOS. Not having this "walled garden" is what will separate iOS and macOS.
For me, I'm looking forward to the Apple Silicon Macs. I'm hoping to see some passively cooled Macs again. I think the last time I had a passively cooled Mac was the B&W PowerMac G3.
Making software and keeping it relevant and up-to-date costs money. If you don't have a subscription model, who's going to pay for new features and maintenance? In the infancy of IT, the constant influx of new customers would pay for this, but there are only so many people that want/need a DAW or what have you, and then this model for money making(to pay for new features, programmers, tech support, etc) doesn't work anymore.
The other option is to charge for upgrades on a regular basis. In practice, this will cost about the same.
What I do hate is if companies make it impossible to use their software if you stop subscribing. My LR catalogue with 80.000 edited pictures is useless without a LR subscription... I could commit all my edits, save them to new files, and get rid of LR, but that's a lot of work and I actually enjoy using LR and PS. So it's worth $10/month to me.
Lots of business oriented software companies charge real money for subscriptions, they have their clientele cornered as changing the inventory software(written in cobol) or what have you is a massive and costly undertaking.