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Comment by midasuni | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I subscribed to a daily newspaper (still subscribe to a weekly news magazine), I subscribed to insurance for my car, home, etc - still do. I subscribed to cable tv, I subscribed to my phone line, I subscribed to my apartment by paying rent, I subscribed to a transport service by paying for a season ticket. As recently as 5 years ago I subscribed to a milk and bread service.

Subscriptions are nothing new. Those subscriptions (short of cable tv) would be nothing unusual 100 years ago.

His examples of beer and cinema are odd as I current consume both, neither through a subscription, however mail order wine clubs date back 100 years.

What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

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> What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

Yep, and that is what’s going away. BMW recently decided to stop offering heated seat subscriptions.

>What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

Enabling additional functionality (or limiting it) for hardware you've already purchased isn't unheard of in business products--including computers--where the unit margins support it. But consumer unit margins are usually thinner and most consumers don't really accept it as a "fair" practice.

Yup and that's not something new either -- it's been pretty standard practice for many decades. But similarly "controversial" from the start for consumers (while basically a non-issue for corporate customers).

I worked for a long ago minicomputer company that sold a scaled-down version of their first SMP system in 3 flavors--and the only difference was microcode that throttled the performance of two of the models.

And when I was an analyst, many people were always surprised to hear all the games that IBM played with mainframes (and to a lesser degree with POWER servers) to sell you the same compute capacity that was cheaper when only used for certain workloads (like Linux) or that was inaccessible until activated "on demand."

IBM is a well known rent seeking megacorporation. That shouldn’t mean that it is OK to do this. Now they are selling open source software with per CPU licensing, but want to prevent others to sell the same software. This should not be accepted by the society.

It’s not a consumer unit problem.

Heated seat subscriptions are bad because by not paying for them, the heated seats are objectively costing you. You are paying for extra weight, streets are paying for extra weight, materials are extra mined and produced so the environment is paying for extra weight. Etc.

It is directly and indirectly objectively negative for you to have heated seats that you don’t want and are not subscribed for.

I doubt that's anyone's complaint. It's more likely they'd have been annoyed to have had crippled seats in a car they'd bought and have to pay an on-going fee for no reason beyond greed. There are no other on-costs for manufacturers unlike other subscription-based products.

It's a very clear signal that the entire market is broken and there isn't competition there.

I just realized that by paying toll yearly, I subscribe to my country's motorways.

And by paying taxes you subscribe to several governmental services on both local and national level.

True, but it feels less like a subscription because it's not a flat amount per month or year.

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