A $8/mo charge for a app based remote start? I could live with that. Servers need power, the app needs updates etc.
A $8/mo charge for something which does not incur costs for Toyota? Hell no.
It seems like bit by bit - every single industry is going down a fucked up route. TVs with built in ads? Cars with pay-by-month features? DRM locked coffee machines? I really hope, there is some sort of evil-bullshit-corp ranking homepage.
If you think that's reasonable, consider that Disney+ charges $8/mo for a system that streams gigabytes of HD video, and they still have money left over to pay actual movie stars.
The price of a service rarely does reflect the actual cost of providing the service, especially with SaaS margins. And $8/mo is not a whole lot of money if you consider your monthly expenses to use your vehicle.
This might not be a big deal if Toyota was the only company contemplating this business model (what's $8/mo, after all?) but I doubt they will be. If every product in your life adds a "small" subscription fee (calculated at 50-1000x actual service costs), things are going to get painful very quickly.
I paid a few dollars for a better dialer, because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Another few dollars for a good calendar app, again because the Samsung dialer is garbage. Hell, I'd gladly pay for a decent web browser. And I say that as a happy Ubuntu user who has been coding for over two decades in VIM, I know my way around FOSS software.
$8/mo may not be a lot of money only because it's just your car doing that. Then you will have your TV charging $8/mo so that you can your a remote controller, $8/mo for the remote of your air conditioner...
Ford offers a bunch of free telematics services for fleet operators. You can pay them and get more functionality, but they'll track your fuel economy, odometers, fault codes, etc - with a really slick web UI.
And you pay $0/month for any of that.
They DO offer a $10/month "Premium Connectivity" package. That adds music streaming via Slacker Radio, Tidal, and Spotify, enables satellite images for the GPS, and allows video streaming (I don't recall the entire list of supported services, but it's pretty comprehensive, and I know includes Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and Twitch, might also include Hulu and HBO).
Of course, if you're connected to WiFi (ie, using a hotspot on your phone, or parked at a location with WiFi), you can get all that streaming without paying the $10/month. Even if you don't pay for the premium connectivity package, you can play Spotify from your phone over Bluetooth.
The fact that Toyota would charge $8/month just for remote start is just evil. It's a charge designed purely to extract as much money from their customers as possible that does not at all reflect the actual cost to them.
All of the remote controls you talk about being free are provided over cellular connections, in addition to nav, voice support, and telemetry being sent back to tesla.
as such, tesla is subject to the same economics as toyota, they have just decided to hide it in the price of the vehicles or on the backs of their investors. They pay AT&T to connect their vehicles to the internet.
Perhaps starlink will allow them to keep hiding the cost, perhaps not, especially if Tesla tries to turn the revenue knobs.
I will say it is kind of strange that Premium Connectivity has no data limit. If I could just figure out how to launch a personal hotspot from my Model 3, I could cut the cord with Comcast...
I think you just highlighted why they will likely never allow a personal hotspot from the car.
How many people would gladly drop their home internet connection if they could just tether to the car which is only $10/month for unlimited data? It would cost Tesla a fortune unless they charged a hefty premium for hotspotting.
They announced the move to a fee model well in advance of actually doing it.
They've handled some things like this poorly at times, but this one they actually did right.
The main experience is free and the premium connectivity fee helps pay for that infrastructure.
I had premium connectivity for a few months and didn't miss it one bit when it expired. navigation still works great and THIS really is a killer feature for Teslas as it makes roadtripping a breeze, since it's well-connected to the Supercharger network's status. The non-premium connectivity also helps facilitate payment for the Supercharger network, so it's not just a pure burden for Tesla.
I'm pretty satisfied with the service fee structure for Tesla. I'd rather have reasonable fees for things that make sense (like Premium connectivity, which has to pay royalties to geospatial mapping companies, artists, and a non-trivial data usage, or Supercharger which uses electricity and requires the chargers to be maintained by technicians) and a long-term sustainable financial situation than free, but crappy and declining, service. And certainly am glad it's not requiring me to pay for super simple things that should be free.
(So the AT&T fee for non-premium connectivity can partially be paid for by Supercharger fees since that's what it helps facilitate. ...supercharging ALSO being reasonably priced, less than equivalent gasoline for a comparable ICE car)
I don't think that it is. I think that it is a charge designed purely to normalize the idea of paying for everything as a subscription.
The next generation of car buyers might not realize that this is ridiculous because by then _everything_ is a subscription, from their shoes to their haircuts.
They are the owners, the 'owners' are the owned, captive market.
I could get a suitable data line myself for $1, at quantity one. I doubt Toyota has to pay anywhere near that much.
"Key fob remote start has nothing to do with an app, nor does the car or the fob communicate with any servers managed by Toyota."
It sounds like this $8/month charge is for the allowing you to use remote start locally presumably over RF.
The fob start is a feature they decided to bundle with the others.
I suspect what you aren't accounting for is the 4G modem in the car that the manufacturer puts in largely to collect data from you, but would love to offset the cost of with upcharges.
I'm happy they did this, so normal people might realize how much the frog is already boiled. This is absolute bullshit, fuck Toyota.
Right now you are looking at it from a bottom up pricing perspective when Toyota priced it using a top down strategy. The price isn't from being able to do those two queries, but from the value of being able to remote start your car or whatever.
Legally, Toyota cars are now like timeshares: you "own" it, but usage fees may increase arbitrairly over time. It's probably legal, but it's a shitty move to charge the consumer the price the market will bear when the consumer has no negotiating power.
I wonder if it is even possible to add aftermarket remote start features.
My family buys used cars, usually in the 3-5 year old range, we do our own repair work, and drive everything for 10-15 years. It's usually close to 15 than 10. We drive them until they drop.
I figured it out one day and the lifetime TCO has been about $100/month per vehicle.
We really, really need legislation that says advertised features can't require an ongoing subscription. The whole scheme of giving the original buyer a "free trial" that lasts long enough that they'll sell the vehicle is just a tactic to seek rent in the secondhand market. The thing is, there are a lot of people buying second hand because they don't have money to waste.
How do you pull yourself up by the bootstraps if the bootstraps require a subscription you can't afford?
Can't have those upstarts worming their way into elite circles now, can we? I thought you'd understand. Once a poor, always a poor, you know.
There's a rather depressing trend of this sort of stuff lately, and a lot of it is coming from people who claim they care about lower income classes - but then conveniently just so happen to do things that are the opposite of what they claim to support. When called on it, you mutter "unintended consequences," "nobody could have foreseen that," and shut the mic off for anyone who predicted exactly what just happened.
I have no idea what I'm going to do next time I'm in the market for a car, because every trend I see in the industry is stuff I do not want. And it's not just cars. It's freakin' everything. I don't need a touch screen on my fridge. Like that joke tweet from a decade ago, I feel like it's just a matter of years before all the couches on the market are wifi connected.
I'm just sitting over here hoping there's blowback that keeps some reasonable stuff on the market. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to become some sort of personal expert on keeping things from 1990 or older running.
I had a slight preference for an automatic transmission but ended up looking mostly at manuals since those often lack a few of the "modern" anti-features. I wish I had better advice to give, the experience honestly bummed me out quite a bit.
My current car's getting to about the number of kms that I usually sell at.
With covid making secondhand cars expensive for some weird reason, and all these terrible modern car trends, I just haven't been able to bring myself to "upgrade".
There's nothing compelling me to get a newer car, except for engine wear.
The dual clutch automatics that are in better cars today are legit pretty amazing tech, but, it just doesn't fit my vibe so to speak. In any case, I'm quite sure my next car is going to be pure electric so it may not even have a transmission, or if it does it'll be a two speed automatic you don't control. Meh.
I'm at the point where I'm considering physically disabling the radios in my appliances.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/zipcar-int...
That's a real error Windows 11 gave me this week. I know, never install a Windows version less than two years old. It's been so long I forgot.
Hex error codes, or generic "Something went wrong" errors are the norm at Microsoft.
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...
Also, whenever the power goes out, I always express thanks that the toilets still work, and they didn't introduce some npm-style pointless dependency.
I'm planning to drive mine until it dies, and suspect that salty winter Midwestern roads will render it unsafe/broken before anything else does.
And it probably applies even more broadly as things that were historically just hardware have an increasingly large software component.
I recently bought a new car. All of the things on the window sticker that required a subscription said "(subscription required)". Is this not enough?
Or are you talking about things like TV/Internet/Radio advertising?
All that is needed is for the advertising to be required to make it clear which features require an ongoing subscription.
I don't see the problem for the used car market - if anything, the fact some features won't be functional without a subscription ought to depress the used price of the car. If you take it to an extreme - say, a car that requires a daily payment to run at all - you'd find that the market price of such a vehicle wouldn't be far above the scrap value.
For me, even if I had to pop the hood of the car I need a mechanic, that is probably a couple of hundred to start with, and add anything he says I need to buy whether I actually I need to or not, it can quickly add up.
It is like me saying why pay for managed email or website hosting, when I can run those myself for much cheaper, even if my time was not a factor, I cannot compare those costs I would have to costs for someone without the skills needed .
Luckily no required monthly services. I have no interest in a car with that.
Sooner or later, we won't even remember how it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years?
I've had a short look at the market, and all the "good" brands (Samsung, LG, Sony) show horrific ads. It looks like the cheap brands simply sell your data. Then there are some local brands, which sell non-TV TV's (no tuner, there's a tax on that). They don't have any smarts at all, but the one I've seen had terrible picture quality
When that day comes buy a monitor, or hack the firmware.
You can always break off the aerial.
How do these things work? Do they have a contract with a phone service operator in each country in the world for unlimited data, or what?
Also the other side is that these cheap TVs are slow as hell. My Vizio has a 15 second startup time before it responds to commands, while it's "Smart"Cast stuff does what it does. This is before it responds to other commands, ex volume. And this is at each session, not cold boot only.
Annoyingly, it STILL takes a few seconds to start up.
My living room TV is a 39" Panasonic from 7 years ago. It's dumb as a brick.. but I almost never watch TV so this is fine!
It'd be nice if you could buy a brand new 55" OLED or whatever and not have to deal with smart TV software. I guess there's the gigabyte, LG, and alienware monitors.
That's what worries me. After a long stint of playing entirely only smartphone games, going back to play some older titles on PC was... really weird. None of the usual pay to play friction or engagement traps that are so ubiquitous.
I did not feel happy that the lack of these things that I actually hated was making me uneasy.
Is the memory hole effect really that strong?
There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.
So when you see things like the investment that's going into things like game streaming and it seems stupid, you have to consider there may not be any expectation of capturing the current market. They're after the market that's in elementary school right now.
Latency is not a problem with game streaming. I'd say quality is more of a problem. With streaming you are only going to get the image a few frames late which is not bad at all.
That's subjective and dependent on the service and the game. I have Stadia, GeForce Now, and local games ( with some overlap). Latency is minimal and barely visible ( invisible for grand strategy games).
Don’t buy a TV, let that market die already.
If China is smart they’ll start selling cars that “just work”. Much like the appeal apple originally had against the crapware loaded windows laptops of the early 2000s
The subscription approach also doesn’t fix any problems - for example, the Adobe subscription solved the common agency/design headache of receiving files for a more recent version of the software. Whereby one couldn’t drop $20-40k to upgrade their software just to get access to one set of files. A situation made worse if the source of the files is unable to back save them. This allowed big agencies to squeeze out smaller competitors which couldn’t update their versions right away. The subscription solved this problem and is generally viewed as a win/win for adobe and their customers.
If I get $8 of value from something, it doesn't reduce my willingness to pay if I suddenly learned that it cost $0 or $1 to provide it rather than $5 or $6. Likewise, if I learned that it cost $10 to provide it, that doesn't make me suddenly willing to trade away $10 or $11 for something that's worth $8 to me. (In a negotiation, I might negotiate differently if I knew the other side's cost structure, but in a "take it or leave it" sale, I decide based on the value to me not the cost to the other party.)
The cost that it takes to provide a good or service is useful for estimating the cheapest available offering. No one is actually going to sell something at cost, but in an efficient market with lots of competition the margin should be whittled away to something very low. If someone is charging significantly more for something than it costs to make, it means they are abusing their market position. Monopolies still need to price their offerings at a point where people don't rage quit and not buy at all, but their goal is to get as close to that number as possible while staying below it for the optimally large section of their customers.
Just because things could be worse doesn't mean they're good and you should be happy with the situation.
I'm sick of this new "subscription lifestyle" thats going on. I loathe subscription services.
Its death (of your income) by a thousand papercuts.
This is a health monitor ring. It is a service, though: You pay $400 for the hardware, then $6 for the privilege of accessing the data it collects, locally, to your device.
I was going to buy it until I saw they were looking for such a predatory revenue stream.
You own nothing, you think you bought those products but its not you property, its still their's. You are just a serf for sale on the 'free market'
I wonder whats next? My toilet won't flush unless I pay $5 for it, in addition to the water bill? It would be hilarious if every single item at home was subscription based, lol
It does seem like a disingenuous comparison. I feel like JetBrains has a pretty fair revenue model.
But I use Jetbrain's software everyday so it makes sense that I should pay them for everyday that I get value out of it. They also are continuely releasing updates for free.
So in a way, we already pay a subscription charge for flushing the toilet.
- Want heated seats? $1/month
- Want remote lock/unlock? $2/month
- Want to remove rate limiting? $5/month
- Want GPS in your car? $10/month
- Want to use your "frunk"? $10/month
- Want Apple CarPlay? $15/month
- Want to activate heads up display (windshield)? $5/month
- Want autonomous driving? $20/month
- Want to update your car's computer? $199 per update
- ...
- Want all the features in your car? "low cost" of $49.99 per month (bundled)
Apple will be seen as a visionary for optimizing the car manufacturing process (no more designing for multiple types of configuration types, can buy all parts in bulk, ...). Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition. But the true cost of ownership (will all features activated) is actually equivalent to the cost of their competition.
Don't forget to buy an Apple Car Care+ warranty ("only $4999.99, will be included if you finance with Apple Card")!
It's already available monthly ($199/mo), thankfully there's the one time purchase option still though ($10,000).
$210 after shipping for navigation updates in a GM vehicle. Welcome to the future!
https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Che...
We just don't build new roads in North America.
OS updates are free. The basic version of iCloud is free. "Find My iPhone" is free. Apple Maps is free. The App Store is free. Hell, CarPlay is free on the Apple end of things; it's some car manufacturers who've been charging for it.
"Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition."
Are we talking about a different Apple entirely?
Serious question, I don’t know, I only use Apple Maps for satellite since it doesn’t do transit where I live. But the quality level definitely feels like an “eat what you kill” product without much food, as opposed to a loss leader for the Apple brand.
Apple conveniently disallows people from making local backups encrypted with your own key, which means in reality you need to pay a monthly fee to store them on iCloud.
If I wanted to back up into iCloud I would have to pay, which is fair. Instead, I'm using my own hard drive.
There’s Time Machine:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/keep-your-time-mach...
Or you can run any number of third party backup software.
I think it's best not to say something is a "lie" unless you have a strong basis for it, let alone asserting it is a "outright lie".
A lie is an intentionally false statement. It involves an intention to deceive. It's highly unlikely that someone on Hacker News would set out to intentionally mislead people who are familiar with the subject-matter and who know how to fact check.
At best they are "wrong", "misinformed" or "mistaken". Although, as said in the first paragraph, I suspect you're actually at cross-purposes with each other.
I don’t see much difference between “confidently stated but provably wrong in seconds via Google” and a lie.
And there is a significant difference between offering an ill-informed opinion and lying. One can be reckless or negligent, but not a liar. To be a liar, they need to positively know they are wrong but post it anyway.
I was hoping you'd say it was simply used for rhetorical effect. I must say, I'm a little disappointed you're maintaining your position. Sometimes, it's best just to assume good faith.
Like I said, others had already covered the iOS side of things.
There are no Apple devices for which the statement is true, and the certainty of "Apple conveniently disallows people from making local backups encrypted with your own key" makes me quite comfortable considering it to be a dishonest statement rather than merely ignorant.
Similar to "vaccines don't work"; whether it's out of ignorance or maliciousness, it's a lie.
(Further complicating matters: telling lies even results in believing them to be truthful over time; it's still a lie! https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/november/lying-old-gutches...)
I would not trust Apple with all my data, which is essentially what you're doing if they have the key.
Can you do a full-disk encrypted backup of your drive using only your own keys and not sending any data back to Apple?
If you can, then I'm wrong. But "outright lie" is an uncharitable interpretation of my error.
Lol, downvoted with no answers. Apple victims are a thin-skinned bunch.
But I really didn't experience that at all. Outside of Apple Music and Apple Arcade (both of which are optional and neither of which I use/pay for) what exactly are the ongoing costs for most Apple hardware? Yes you have to buy some of the software, but that's true of basically every operating system; my 2014 Macbook still gets free updates as of about 8 months ago (I haven't checked since then since I gave it to my sister in law).
In fact I actually have found that Apple-centric apps seem to give me more options in which to pay for them outright instead of ongoing costs. Most of the the Omnigroup's software has a "just buy it once and you're done" feature, unlike something like, for example Microsoft Office.
I think the upgrade prices are reasonable, $1/month for 50GB and $3/month for 200GB, but I can see characterizing that as nickel and diming. They should have bumped up the 5 GB base plan years ago.
$3/month for 200Gb is reasonable in your opinion, but people who don't buy Apple can buy a 2T drive for $50.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-up-iphone-iph3ec...
I'm not all over the details because there were so many reasons for me not to go Apple that this was just the tip of the iceberg.
As far as comparing prices, yes, a bare hard drive is cheaper but I'm paying for that storage with services and backups attached to it. A hard drive won't automatically sync photos between my phone and my computer, and I'm more likely to have that hard drive fail than I am to lose iCloud.
Replacing iCloud storage with a big hard drive is a bit like replacing a car with a motorcycle. Yeah you can buy way more acceleration for less money, but good luck moving your furniture.
What you lose in convenience, you gain in privacy, since iCloud backups are not e2e encrypted.
https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/iphone-backup-icloud...
And I'm not talking about the accessories that have enough active electronics to possibly justify it (pencil, or airpods), but things like cases, wheels, stands, dongles, etc.
Apple accessories very much are trying to nickel and dime people (on top of hardware that is already quite expensive), so it is unsurprising that people would (mistakenly) assume that Apple would try to do the same with digital subscriptions.
Now the lightning adapters I agree on. Those were absurd. But now they have USB-C on most of their products and they have dropped the cost of adapters quite a lot. The USB-C to AUX adapter contains a full DAC which is tested to be one of the best you can get, and it costs $9.
That's not it at all. At least not for me.
I'm a "free as in freedom" rather than "free as in beer" kinda guy.
And that's why I won't touch Apple gear. Heck, I don't even like beer.
Add on people across the spectrum may buy expensive-ish or expensive hardware, but cheap out on [any] digital purchases or subscriptions.
All of this makes the reason to assume appear to be because of bias and disliking of the brand.
There are many reasons it's done this way, but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.
How?
Licensing music requires ongoing payments from Apple to music owners.
iCloud requires Apple to maintain data centers and bandwidth.
TV+ requires ongoing investment into creation of new video productions.
News+ is similar to music, Apple has ongoing costs to pay the owner of the journalism.
Games also gets new games all the time, so presumably there are ongoing expenses there also.
And fitness+ might be one where there is less need for ongoing expenses, but they do seem to be adding content regularly.
However if this is an extension of the original argument for why it makes sense to assume Apple is Nickle and diming over priced digital services. It doesn’t fit.
I don’t see how people can compare this to being turned upside down like you say unless they are claiming that for every major tech company. At which point Apple has little to do with it. Otherwise I don’t see how that thinking can be for any reason other than strong to extreme bias against Apple specifically.
I don’t recall being upsold applecare+ before. Maybe it’s a pretty small part of the online checkout process and I haven’t noticed it? I’m sure it happens. A family member and a friend have asked about it because they were being unsold. Still, this isn’t like some of the infamous upselling industries and niches.
The ethics problem here isn't the subscription at all, it's with the clear and good faith communication of what the product is to which the user is subscribing.
In this particular case, it seems like the Toyota Remote Connect service was sold and marketed as a phone app, but when terminated it also removes the capability of remote starting the car over local radio (probably bluetooth I guess) from the key fob, which no one seems to have known was part of the product in the first place. That's bad, if so.
(But to be fair, a better article would track down some Toyota owners for quotes about what they were told, and maybe a copy of the original license agreement. This coverage from Ars is IMHO a little weak.)
That said, if Apple did bring some of these features to market at that price, they'd be doing considerably better than some of their competition. Tesla's Full Self Driving is locked behind a $10,000 cost or a $199 monthly subscription. You'd have to subscribe to your speculated service for 42 years before it cost more than that getting the upgrade on Tesla you had 4 decades ago.
The engine wouldn't be bolted in, everything would be welded into place. Parts to repair it would not be accessible, except at Apple dealerships. If it doesn't start, you could expect to replace the Main Driving Unit at a price roughly 90% of buying a new one.* The entire car would have tamper sensors. Also, they would make the car one inch shorter every year.
I can't imagine Apple as a car company.
* Seriously, the main logic board seems to always be the culprit and the replacement cost is up there with a new item.
Not at the cost of repairability and reliability they don't.
In my dell XPS, friends lebovo, etc. I can replace battery, ssd, or any other part with just a screwdriver.
Some other problems from their obsession with thin. Broken keyboards for multiple years. And that's moving from already bad chiclet keyboards into broken keyboards.
There was also a couple year period when ethernet ports were on the corners and it seemed everyone had their macbook dented right at the ethernet port. It could have been reinforced at that point along the edge, but they have to aggressively bevel those edges for the marketing glamour shots that make them look impossibly thin.
Oh, speaking of the beveled edges, the early airs and ipads were rounded so far toward the center that if you placed them on a table, and pressed near the edge with any force at all it would flip the far side of the device off the table. A real problem for an ipad which is a touchscreen and for anyone who touches their palms to their keyboard while typing.
Those are problems from making things minimally thin, or worse, making them appear thinner than they are. I don't expect them to actually make cars one inch shorter every year. I do expect them to have some weird obsession that they will tout as the best thing ever and min/max it to death.
Surely you meant 4.2 years? 10000/199/12 = 4.18760469012 (years).
> Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition
The Apple car is electric, with two charging point, the batteries last a long time but the special Apple charge connection hub costs $1199, there is a part of it that is really smartly designed but somehow also more fragile than you would expect and as a consequence you replace these one per year because it breaks beyond repair.
The first year you replace it fine, and the cost is actually down to $1099.
The second year the old model is no longer available but the new model that will work with your car and the newer Apple cars both also will work to charge any apple device if you lay it on the Apple car dashboard while charging with the new model charger. It's some sort of clever design innovation that you're not sure why it couldn't work without the new charger but ok, anyway the new charger costs $1330.
You have 3 forms of heated seat pads, these are the simple at 199, the integrated at 499 that has a dedicated app to monitor optimal healthy sitting posture and maintain vitals connection to your Apple Watch, and the Pro at 1100 that allows you handle racing speed Gs.
You need to have the Pro to unlock the Racing Speed Gs because of safety features that would kick in without the Pro helping to handle that speed.
In the end of year 3 the next level Pro brings in massage capabilities at 1400, but you find that it uses up too much battery requiring more and longer charging unless you update to the new Charger Pro which costs also 1400.
Want Apple debug data for your car, you get extra data on your Apple iCloud, but not enough to actually make it usable in fact basically the car uses up the data you had so quickly that you have to pay for iCloud+ Andretti, which gives you a basic 3 TB storage, and a revolving time series data for car usage that can be used for diagnostics etc. $15 a month.
The Car camera array is really sweet but you find that road trip you made to the keys maxed out your iCloud, so you opt in for the iCloud+ Trixie account $20 dollars a month but with 7 TB, you figure that will probably last.
Most of the apps for the car are free, if you call advertising supported apps free, but there are a few ones you find essential that you pay for of course.
One of them is the top notch autonomous driving app AutoDRave which costs a basic $120 but if you want the continually updated road conditions and newest ML edge case determination routines you should really pay for the $25 a month subscription.
I think we all get the picture here....
Wow I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant.
Writing this on a 2013 Apple iPad Air that has not cost me a single cent to use every day for the last 8 years.
Because Apple are the nickel-and-dime masters.
From removing headphone sockets in order to sell stupidly expensive wireless headphones, to stupidly overpriced soldered memory and storage upgrades, to the 30% appstore fee scam, to disallowing local backups to promote their iCloud storage racket, to unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery, to keyboards that need motherboard replacement to replace a key, to disallowing WebGPU so victims can't play online games instead of the games they take their 30% cut from, to proprietary connectors that they abandon a year later, to iPhone displays that can't even be replaced with another legitimate iPhone display, they do everything in their power to lock-in and bleed their victims dry.
Literally everything they do is a scam to nickel-and-dime their victims.
Every item they sell has all these arbitrary limitations just so they can take a cut.
They are usually the first to do every terrible consumer-hostile action because their victims are locked-in suckers with Stockholm syndrome whose devices don't work with any other companies devices or accessories.
And then other companies see their success and copy them.
So naturally any conversation about companies being assholes will skew towards discussing Apple, because they are the biggest and most successful assholes.
The removal of the headphone socket, from their perspective, was to move people to wireless headphones. Yes, it was a move everyone hated, but it didn't drive people across to Google/Samsung.
The 30% app store fee is a problem for the developers, not the consumers.
I can make local backups of my iPhone still. I don't have to use iCloud.
Unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery (I assume you mean iPhones) is to reduce their manufacturing cost and to make the device more reliable. Same nonsense about the displays. The displays include the facetime cameras and infrastructure, which is intimately tied to the security enclave. Having those two bound together makes the device more secure.
Should they offer the software to every 3rd party repairer? No. Should they make it available along with spares and an online service to bind the two elements? Yes. That way, the service can be done by a 3rd party, but the security remains with Apple. I don't want people to be able to hack the facetime/SE.
Calling disallowing WebGPU as somehow creating "victims" is nonsense.
Apple produces products that people like and pay for. I have a 2014 laptop that still gets (free) upgrades, I have a 2019 iMac that has the best display ever released in consumer desktops. It also allowed me to upgrade the memory. I have an iPhone 12 mini that is great, my iPhone SE is a great remote control and Siri interface and also still gets upgrades.
Will I be able to upgrade RAM in an Mx series Apple product? No, because the memory is built into the SOC. Will Apple overcharge on that RAM? Probably. But on the other hand, having the RAM available to both CPUs and GPUs directly is obviously more efficient in both power and performance that it's worth it.
Will I pay that "tax" to get everything else that comes with the product? Yes. It's worth it in the longer term of a 5 year life of an Apple product.
Like Epic? No Fortnite on iOS. Tell me how all of that is not bad for consumers.
>The removal of the headphone socket, from their perspective, was to move people to wireless headphones.
Which only serves Apple's interests. There is zero reason they couldn't have a headphone socket in addition to wireless. If their wireless was so compelling people would happily switch without these artificial self-serving incentives.
Samsung S10 5G has headphone socket, is waterproof and is 7.9mm thick vs iPhone 13 which is 7.7mm. That was just the first phone I could find, there's probably thinner ones with headphone sockets. So the thickness argument is ridiculous.
>Unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery (I assume you mean iPhones) is to reduce their manufacturing cost and to make the device more reliable.
5c for a connector on such an expensive phone? And no, it's their laptops as well, because Apple. Only serves Apple's interests, of course.
> Same nonsense about the displays. The displays include the facetime cameras and infrastructure, which is intimately tied to the security enclave. Having those two bound together makes the device more secure.
Untrue and only serves Apple's interests. Security theater and, you guessed it, only serves Apple's interests.
>Calling disallowing WebGPU as somehow creating "victims" is nonsense.
Untrue and only serves Apple's interests. Apple products are crippled and have so many arbitrary limitations that always conveniently serve Apple's interests.
You have drunk gallons of the kool aid.
There are two types of product in the computing world: shameless ripoffs of Apple products and rough prototypes for some future Apple product.
Guess this would make the Model T the "rough prototype" for the Apple Car...
Ford even used to make Apple-like demands of his supply chain. He insisted that parts be shipped in crates conforming to specific, peculiar dimensions. The suppliers were baffled by the request -- why those dimensions? Until a supplier representative looked down at the floor of a Model T one day... the crates had been broken down to form floorboards for the car.
That's not the Apple Way. Cost will be significantly higher than the competition, but it comes with a shiny, large apple on the engine hatch, and celebrities will make it a lifestyle choice product. Having an AppleCar will be the economically and technologically inferior, but socially "more acceptable" option.
And by then, people will have conveniently forgot normal gas stations/electric chargers won't work - gotta get to the premium-priced Apple fuel stations with the proprietary gas pumps/electric connectors. Users will eventually believe those are better quality, too, and when Apple finally is forced to adapt back to standards by legislative bodies, they will sell this as a "huge innovation".
The people that currently have "Apple fuel stations" is Tesla. So I'm not sure why you're blaming Apple for something that already exists.
Hah, I have an Amazon Fire TV, not the stick, the actual TV. So...built in ads...huzzah... the UI on the TV has gotten progressively worse.