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That is just bullshit. 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

• dannyphantom 5y ago
  >... TVs with built in ads?... 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.
• p0wn 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • pfortuny 5y ago
    It is as much capitalism as usury is interest: a false version.
    • gaganyaan 5y ago
      Given the history of the word, it's exactly the meaning of capitalism: > Meaning "political/economic system which encourages capitalists" is recorded from 1872, originally used disparagingly by socialists. https://www.etymonline.com/word/capitalism https://www.etymonline.com/word/capitalism
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        There's a difference between "capitalist" and "rentier", though. These people are rentiers, not capitalists.
        • gaganyaan 5y ago
          I'm not sure what your point is. Rentier capitalism is a subset of capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism But I'm merely pointing out that the original usage of "capitalism" was not a compliment, and certainly included these sorts of practices.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    > It's capitalism. Good thing they renamed "fraud". The old name got a bit of a bad reputation.
• pradn 5y ago
  You're right to point out that these problems arise across entire industries. You can't vote with your money if all otherwise good TVs have crap built into them. And it's not easy for a new entrant to gain a foothold in such a high-tech market. And even if they do, there's plenty of temptation to go down the same route of milking customers who already bought your product. 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?
  • zeroflow 5y ago
    The topic with the TVs is going to be a problem for me in a few years. My current TV is from 2013 - it may have some years to go, but at some point, it will fail. 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
    • mavhc 5y ago
      Just don't connect them to the internet, now you have a TV that's cheaper than it should be because they expect to show you ads, but they can't
      • nanidin 5y ago
        This remains true for now, but expect the ubiquity of things like Amazon Sidewalk, Helium network, and embedded cellular modules in devices to make it hard to avoid a device that phones home.
      • brewdad 5y ago
        My Sony would pop up a nag screen in the middle of a movie or show to remind me that it wasn't connected to the internet. Eventually, I caved and connected it.
      • 5y ago
• xyst 5y ago
  If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function. - 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")!
  • martin8412 5y ago
    So like Tesla with FSD, though not monthly(yet)
    • flutas 5y ago
      > though not monthly(yet) It's already available monthly ($199/mo), thankfully there's the one time purchase option still though ($10,000).
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • donmcronald 5y ago
    > Want to update your car's computer? $199 per update $210 after shipping for navigation updates in a GM vehicle. Welcome to the future! https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Chevrolet_Tahoe_2014/GM-North-America-Map-Update-DENSO-Global-A-v-2016/sku/23286275/en_US/GMNA/USD https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Che...
• rafale 5y ago
  You will own nothing and you will be happy.
• donmcronald 5y ago
  There were people in a thread on Reddit saying they have cars with $40/month of subscription services. That seems absolutely insane to me. 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?
  • Syonyk 5y ago
    > 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.
    • xanaxagoras 5y ago
      Who would have thought the revolution won't be sponsored by Toyota or Pepsi? The corporate SJW movement is all marketing, it's really depressing to see it work on people.
    • citizenpaul 5y ago
      It was started by gates and buffett "the giving pledge" they are now a decade into giving their fortune away and are comicallty richer than when they started. That kind of hipocracy tends to flow top down and now we are seeing the results.
• unethical_ban 5y ago
  https://ouraring.com/product/heritage-silver https://ouraring.com/product/heritage-silver 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.
• bushbaba 5y ago
  And yet it opens the door for new competition to enter. 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
  • type0 5y ago
    A car that just works without any modern features is Lada Niva 4x4, those are really old school but some people like it that way.
• matthewdgreen 5y ago
  $8/mo is genuinely a lot of money for this kind of infrastructure, even if there are developers and servers to be paid for. Assume that there are only 100,000 users. This would imply $9.6M per year in revenue to cover infrastructure and dev salaries for a system that handles ~2 queries/day/customer! And 100,000 is a very small number. Presumably Toyota has millions of customers. 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.
  • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    Kia wants $15 a month for the same app-based signal. It's straight highway robbery. 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.
  • engagingdata 5y ago
    yup, this is absurd
  • moooo99 5y ago
    Toyota wouldn't be doing it to cover costs, it would be there to generate profits. I wouldn't even mind if the app is good. We have a BMW with connected drive, the connectivity included is basically useless. It has a latency of around 2-3 minutes, depending on your cell signal. 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.
    • matthewdgreen 5y ago
      Yes, I understand that people will charge what the market will bear, and in this case Toyota has decided they can charge a lot -- because you bought the car and now they have you at their mercy. I was responding to the GP poster who explicitly justified it by the cost of operating the service. 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.
• quitit 5y ago
  Subscription pricing for things which aren’t subscriptions is bullshit.
  • kazamaloo 5y ago
    All companies try to get in on it, too.
  • jsrcout 5y ago
    I call it "property as a service". Wherein you have to pay recurrent rent on things you "own" to keep using them.
    • quitit 5y ago
      As a side note I feel rent isn’t a good comparison, as these new types of subscription have no bonafide scarcity or cost. While rental properties have real costs: taxes, maintenance, acquisition costs, advertising/agent costs and so on. Charging rent is appropriate because the owner deprives themselves of part or whole of the property (but not its costs) for the renter. This isn’t comparable with a subscription for a keyfob - especially as it’s a feature which has worked just fine without such arrangements. 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.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  When I contemplate buying something, I care about the value it delivers to me, not the cost required to provide it. 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.)
  • jjk166 5y ago
    If you derive more than $8 of value from something, then buying the $8 thing is not explicitly off the table. But if you can get the exact same thing for free, or even just for $7 elsewhere, it would be really dumb to buy it for $8. 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.
• akudha 5y ago
  They are simply copying software industry. Tableau, Jetbrains... none of these need to be subscription based, but they are. They weren't, until a few years ago. 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
  • p_j_w 5y ago
    Jetbrains is only kind of a subscription. If you end your subscription, you retain permanent access to whatever version was current when you last paid. That doesn't seem drastically different from how software worked before and their prices are pretty reasonable for an IDE.
  • PenguinCoder 5y ago
    You mentioned Jetbrains but not worse actors like Adobe, or Microsoft. Seems disingenuous.
    • nitrogen 5y ago
      The OP has probably managed to eliminate Adobe and MS from their lives, so they didn't come to mind.
      • jpalawaga 5y ago
        Jetbrains can be used without a subscription, unless if you want the most recent software updates. It does seem like a disingenuous comparison. I feel like JetBrains has a pretty fair revenue model.
  • charcircuit 5y ago
    >none of these need to be subscription based 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.
    • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• charlieflowers 5y ago
  Yeah. We consumers are going to have to band together to defend ourselves and take back our power. (Funny, and true -- I did not start with socialism in mind when I said that).
  • karaterobot 5y ago
    I don't know of any flavor of socialism that, historically, has solved this class of problem in a way that most of us would prefer.
• 14 5y ago
  Please go to their facebook page or other contact location and write them exactly that. I wrote them and told them how disappointed I was and how it seems so petty. I also said that when I buy a new car I would now have to consider my second favorite company as a move like this though only $8 is enough to turn me off of a company completely. They are a premium brand and people pay a premium for their cars there is no need for this. Especially when any car can add remote start from a local mechanic are they going to block people from doing that? What a sham
• senectus1 5y ago
  $8 a month is a LOT. I'm sick of this new "subscription lifestyle" thats going on. I loathe subscription services. Its death (of your income) by a thousand papercuts.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  >"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?" 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'
• zerocount 5y ago
  Just what we need, 300 million people locked out of their coffee machines. Thank God that didn't happen during Covid lock-downs! :)
• deleted 5y ago
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