I grew up thinking that paying for a product meant getting the product. A laptop came with its features. A car came with its hardware. A printer was still a menace, but at least it was a one-time menace.
I noticed the shift when my subscriptions stopped being mostly media and started attaching themselves to physical things. It was one thing to pay every month for movies, music, or cloud storage. It was another to watch the same logic spread into gadgets, cars, fitness gear, and smart home devices that already came with a price tag.
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Then came stories like the smart bed that lost parts of its functionality during an AWS outage. That was the moment the whole model stopped feeling modern and started feeling deranged. More and more products now arrive with an asterisk attached: pay for the hardware, then pay again for
...Keep reading this article on Digital Trends.
