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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

They're also bringing the subscription pricing model...

I'd much rather pay $50/year and get perpetual updates than the old price of $199 one time.

Yes, I'd rather pay $5 one time and get free updates forever, but I just can't see complaining about $4/month for anything I get ongoing value from.

Interesting- I'd much rather pay the perpetual fee.

At home, I run a 13 year old Mac Mini in my studio. Everything DAW related on it still works, and it's all compatible with each other. This is quite common in many studios I've worked in. It's not unusual to be running 10-15+ year old machines. Everything is updated as far as it's ever going to go on that hardware.

I do like the Jetbrains model where there is a perpetual fallback license. It think that would be a good balance for software like DAWs.

Do you have an audio interface and is it the same one you started with? Does it still get driver updates ooi?

That setup is using an Apogee Duet Firewire. I had an original digidesign mbox (USB 1!) hooked up to the Mini before that.

The original Duet stopped getting driver updates a few years back. For a while, apogee had a trade-in deal if you sent them your old firewire interface, but then I would have had to update hardware + software to support it.

The last update I did was OSX from 10.11 to 10.13, and this was partly to keep some of the project work synchronizing with dropbox.

At this point I'm kind of just keeping this system alive to get through my latest project and observing the first few years of Apple Silicon before I build a new system.

You like losing access when you cancel the subscription?

Or when an older device is cut off from the app store?

As many readers here probably understand from first hand experience, software isn’t a final product (typically).

The majority of software requires maintenance and any ongoing feature updates have a continual cost on the company.

If they asked for a subscription and said, no more updates after tomorrow, then sure that’s Bs.

But especially for something like Final Cut, you’ll get continual updates and feature improvements, and you get recurring value.

I’m all for FOSS, but there are many cases where the paid incentive version is far better than open offerings, and that’s just how it is today.

I don't think the concern is that the subscription doesn't bring value. Just that it builds no equity. Once the renting agreement ends, you lose all the access you once had, not just access to future things to come.

(edit: I don't know if this is actually true of Final Cut Pro's model)

Right, but that's the tradeoff and it's a good tradeoff for many.

If you only need Final Cut Pro for a 2-month project, it's amazing because you'll save so much money.

And any time you need it again, you just resubscribe. You're never losing access permanently, it's just $5 away.

The point is that the flexibility and ongoing updates are a more beneficial tradeoff.

A lot of people (like myself) simply don't care about owning equity in software, so we have eternal access. It's just a tool, and it loses value over time without updates anyways.

> It's just a tool, and it loses value over time without updates anyways.

Why? It will continue to do exactly the same thing. If that thing had no value to you why are you getting it?

Edit:

> Because the world moves forward. Something that might have worked well 5 years ago but has had no updates or improvements to keep up with competition is ultimately not as useful as it once was.

Not everything is a javascript library though.

>It will continue to do exactly the same thing. If that thing had no value

The parent poster you're replying to wrote "loses value" not "no value".

As an example, I have the last version of Adobe Creative Suite CS6 ($2599) that had a permanent license with CDs instead of subscription download but that came out in 2012. Over the last 11 years, that old software has continually lost value.

The old version cannot easily be installed on newer macOS versions after Catalina. I can't freeze my os version at Catalina to satisfy Adobe CS6 because other tools like the latest Xcode and Logic Pro forces you to upgrade to newer macOS versions. I can't freeze Xcode at an old version because Apple's App Store rejects apps built by old versions of Xcode. And then you have the lack of desirable new features. E.g. the old Premiere Pro in CS6 can't open newer ProRes HDR HLG files.

The rest of the world around a particular software changes which then affects its value.

So "owning the software forever" doesn't necessarily translate into continually using it forever in a practical way.

It will continue to do exactly the same thing…on exactly the same hardware and OS. Chances are that in several years, you’ll be using newer hardware and a newer OS. So the old software might not work at all. Or, it might work, but not use new hardware capabilities. An example of this is old X11 software: it runs on a modern Mac, but is unaware of Retina displays so it looks horrible.

Because the world moves forward. Something that might have worked well 5 years ago but has had no updates or improvements to keep up with competition is ultimately not as useful as it once was. Depending on how good other software has gotten, it very well could be a case of wasting money by not switching over depending on how much you value your time.

It's generally better for your finances to not pay 100% of a committment today if interest on payments is below the immediate return of how you'd otherwise use the money.

The way we use a platform over time changes, as does options in the market and the way a business treats that platform. If we can export and keep our IP that was developed through the platform, it's not a bad thing to have the option to cut and run without having sunk purchase costs.

It also provides a signal for the business's product team to use with finance to argue for how to continue updating the product. Ongoing engagement metrics and new conversions are continually reviewed. How those change with the release of, or marketing of, different features directly drives the development of the platform—it should in the best case see a more useful product in our hands over time.

That's true but I think a lot of professional users prefer the service model for cash flow (and maybe tax?) reasons. For those users, maybe a monthly service fee is better than purchasing?

I feel like folks on HN (many of us developers ourselves) give this theory too much credance. Subscription pricing may be necessary to finance continuous development, but that doesn’t mean it will. Many developers (particularly larger corporations like Adobe) have taken advantage of this perception to see how much money they can squeeze out of people while making… fewer updates than their users are paying for (to put it nicely). I’m sure there are indie developers who get away with this too (although I feel less bad about that).

I’m not totally against this way of thinking, but I do think we need to start presenting it as the double-edged issue it currently is, not the fresh perspective it used to be.

Agreed, and further I don't think I buy the premise that without updates it won't work. For SaaS that's definitely true. For some desktop software that's true too, but it's true far less than we make it out to be nowadays. I have a handful of Android apps that got updated in a direction I didn't like that I still run and still run fine (sometimes dropping server supported features like old PocketCasts before the NPR acquisition) even though they haven't been updated in years. For apps that don't rely on server support this is nearly always true.

I agree, and that’s a good argument for an alternative icing model that includes a one time payment for a version, I think jetbrains does this (and a discount on subsequent update patches)

"As many readers here probably understand from first hand experience, software isn’t a final product (typically)."

But then Logic Pro for the mac has been a one time purchase for me since Logic Pro X and has been religiously updated every year with tons of new content and features. Probably to empower Mac sales, which is a boost that they feel the iPad does not need.

Or when Apple decides to completely cancel the product across all devices?

I know Apple is growing towards being a service provider, but they have a long history of dropping support for older soft- and hardware.

Staying at an older OS or old hardware or running unsupported software isn’t ideal, but with a SaaS offering, the provider can cut access overnight.

what older device is cut off from the app store? you get to keep that version that you have and the subscription will go on.

You can see into the future?

no, i can see into the past and you're being disingenuous. this is the current way that older apps are supported, and compared to android, apple provides longest support for older os versions. the ones that are not supporten anymore get to keep (and download) the latest compatible version of the app. i had a device where i tested that.

Yeah, subscription sucks. $200 bucks for Logic and Final cuts desktop is such a nice deal. Final Cut used to be like $1000+ bucks and Logic $800+ or something.

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