“The winds of change are upon us, dear Mac user,” Jeffrey Mincey writes for Mac360. “Ownership rapidly is becoming a thing of the past. Soon we’ll be renters who use technology gadgets and apps and pay for the privilege by the month.”
“The subscription era is here and after adding up some of the monthly fees, I’m not happy about it,” Mincey writes. “Subscription apps are here and added up they combine to devastate my budget.”
“The subscription trend has reached the point where I cannot afford to use all the Mac, iPhone, and iPad applications I want, so I’m on the lookout for lesser expense. Here’s one I found. And it’s a subscription.,” Mincey writes. “It’s called Setapp and it gives you a bunch of disparate but popular applications for a monthly fee. $10 per month gets you unlimited access to a wide variety of Mac apps.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: You’re going to need a bigger budget. 😉
SEE ALSO:
Are subscription-based apps the future, or will they implode? – August 16, 2017
How to import TextExpander snippets into TypeIt4Me – April 6, 2016
When should software be a subscription service? – April 6, 2016
Now it’s time for somebody to come out with and all access subscription for a reduced price.
Until the next great app wants to be added to the bundle so the price goes up or less popular apps drop out.
Buying Apps even single users are cheap but the worse is Adobe subscription.
I am still using CS4. I own it and I don’t use it often but it does what I need.
The only subscription I have is MS Office 365 – and I wouldn’t need that if Apple hadn’t stripped Pages of its functionality and hadn’t screwed up iCloud. OneDrive and all the other apps work well enough on all my devices (2 Macs, iPad and iPhone) and it’s cheap. But it still peeves me that I need it just because Apple screwed up.
Could you not use LibreOffice in place of Word, Excel and Powerpoint? It’s free, and open-source.
I have used LibreOffice spreadsheet for 6 or 7 years. It will do everything better than Excel. I have written hairy mathmatical calculations covering 6 interactive sheets to do my work.
AND it has a real function display bar. I have all my associates using it, and many customers.
I used Word for years, but Pages for the last 5 or so. As for functionality, Balmer said it best “of course, Word doesn’t work as well on a Mac”. I switched to Pages when Word went crazy if I put more that two pictures on a page.
Keynote beats the rest.
How does it handle pivot tables?
Worst of all are true “Pro” apps for designers, engineering, modeling, etc. Those run $5000 and up with a $1000+/year “maintenance/support/upgrade” fee.
But the app I use, Solidworks, simply can’t be replaced by anything less expensive. The results I get pay me well.
Shit, our solid works professional cost $24K a seat. And maintenance is like $3-4K a seat.
If you make your living using Adobe software, it is a very good value. If you don’t, then why complain?
I make my living on Abobe CS6 and will never pay a penny for a subscription …
Buying Apps even single users are cheap, choose wisely and limit your expense. Thank goodness not every company has gone that way.
Just say no to subscription apps and hardware. It’s the trend and if people stop buying the subscription then it will stop.
The other alternative is to just get hacked versions of software.
Why would anyone buy a product like ring. Pay for the video recording, security cameras, ect. and get nothing back from it you cold get with a SD card.
This is just opening door for Chinese companies to take over the market. Look at Arlo cam, they charge a monthly fee for really nothing. But you can by a Yi camera and not have a subscription and have the video on a SD card.
People are still not paying for photoshop and their subscription model.
Just get the basic Arlo plan which is free.
Or they could just let me upload my video to my NAS rather then depend on a internet connection to upload to their servers. Their “basic” free plan is very limited and limited for a reason. Then of course if you added a bunch of their cameras you have to upgrade. It would be easy to just program it to upload to my NAS. Now I have a lot more storage with my YI, no internet connection required, no lost footage due to internet outrages.
Yeah, it’s worked fine for me too. No complaints.
No subscriptions for me. Not for any music streaming, Office, ProTools, whatever. You want my money, I pay to own.
So you’re telling me you don’t pay a permanent monthly fee for your screwdrivers, cutlery, bathroom scale, towels, garden tools, toothbrush, computer, etc. etc.?
Seriously, software is just another tool. They give it to me once, and then expect me to pay every month!!! No thanks. Never.
You confused me. First paragraph, you rent everything. (the imperial you). The second, you won’t rent anything.
I’m confused.
Hey, we agree 100%!
Not now, not ever …
Even when buying software, you’re never “owning” it. It’s just a perpetual licence to use it.
The only subscription I have is Microsoft Office 365 for myself and my wife. Apple’s own software (Pages) is not up to my standard for a word processor. Word is much better IMO.
If everybody banded together and stopped buying subscriptions, that model would die. That will probably never happen though cause most people are weak and don’t mind being extorted.
But it’s not necessary for people to “band together”.
E.g.
The current version of Pages is still crap.
If they ever get it back to the abilities of 4.3, then I MIGHT buy it for other improvements that would (I hope) have happened.
But if they then wanted to make it subscription, I just wouldn’t bother. I’d stick with 4.3. No “banding” or persuading me to the cause necessary.
I think there would be plenty of people like that… who’ll consider paying an upgrade fee every couple or few years, but are not going to pay monthly.
Let see, I use Adobe CC every day to make a living. It cost me around $54 dollars including tax. I get access to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat DC, Animate, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Premier, Adobe Encoder, Type Kit, plus a bunch of additional iOS iPad Pro compatible apps with the added value of 20GB of cloud storage and the ability to collaborate on a project with other Adobe CC users. One BC design pays for the entire month. This represents an excellent value for me since I use all of the mentioned packages with varying frequency. Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and Photoshop I use every single day.
As I posted previously.
Let’s see, I use Adobe CS6 everyday to make a living. It cost me zero dollars a month … 😎
That’s the way it should be. Any chance you could post some of your work here? It would be really nice to see what people do with their Macs rather than listening to citizen and botty insult each other.
Yeah, those two can really hijack a thread and stuff my inbox in a N.Y. minute. It is what it is.
Through the years I’ve done work for national clients, but it is best for business to remain private.
Thanks for the thought …
Paying to “rent” software is BS, same as paying “rent” to listen to music. We should work on collectively EFFng these subscribtion companies by not using their products.
Look what paying “rent” got you with cable tv: You still have commercials except YOU are paying to watch them. Wouldn’t you rather have free TV over the air and have your payment be commercials?
Same thing could happen to radio. We should NOT have to pay a monthly “rent” to listen to music. Get it over the air and lets screw the rent seeking bastards royally!
and chicks for free
This so-called “era” is merely a bad marketing strategy, one which I fully ignore. You want my business? You let me BUY a license st a fair price. I don”t pay licensing fees that, when they’re not paid will kill MY software, be they apps, tunes, etc.
If required, I’ll run paid SW on virtualized older macOS, QED.
Rent SW = FAIL 😛
Well said. DC.
This is unbelievable and leaves a pit in my Apple loyalty stomach …
This is a negative road for Apple and at some point will cause a massive backlash in that more and more people will decide that monthly subscriptions are a con and so move to jailbreaking phones just so as not to pay for ever greedy monthly payments for app developers.
Also bundles will become bloat ware on your iPhones or your Mac as you rent apps you don’t really want because they are in a bundle.
Its not a positive future in the long term for Apple and it is a narrow greedy money driven view that is currently only popular through taking the purchase option away.
Apple need to look closer at the ramifications of the whole rental/subscription future as it will eventually cause a breakup of a dedicated following who support doing everything legal for developers and Apple through one off purchases and occasional update fees.
Once cracks on subscription software becomes available so does the break up of the Apple eco system as Apples relies of iOS updates to drive its own movements in the iPhone world (SDK’s like the new ARK kit )
Apple relies on the majority of users to upgrade to a new OS fast else everyone loses,
All this will come to pass because the greedy want regular monthly payments (Apple included music subscriptions)
Stopping (purposely moving away from) the user to own and control their apps and music will eventually short change everyone.
“Stopping (purposely moving away from) the user to own and control their apps and music will eventually short change everyone.”
This dedicated Apple follower will do just about anything to avoid subscrition payments and yes, it will fracture Apple loyalty fans like myself on an epic scale not seen before. Sheeple excluded.
Going from “it just works” to “it just works if you pay monthly.” No way, Jose! Not now, not ever.
I bought the full suite of Adobe CS6 software and said goodbye Adode, keep your cloud monthly payments. No need to upgrade ever again. The software does everything I need and don’t use half of what it can do. How greedy a change from Adobe beginnings in the 1980s. And now like Apple doesn’t have enough money, SHEESH.
Same with iCloud. Why rent cloud storage when I could buy TB drives for a couple hundred bucks? Maybe I don’t mindlessly want all my photos, music, etc. on all my devices. A concept anathema to Apple.
I don’t want to rent ANYTHING!
My philosophy has always been — iBuy, iOwn, iControl … PERIOD.
As someone who has a ton of subscription options, the model makes sense to me.
If a developer creates an App that is popular and does what you need it to do that’s great, but how do they get you to purchase the next version if what you have is already doing an ok job? Chances are you won’t buy it, even if it has a couple of new compelling features.
And if they don’t have scheduled income coming in, how do you plan to innovate, create and improve.
I see the challenges they have, I subscribe to a couple of fitness Apps, Apple Music, and more.
And it seems many are ok with perpetually paying Microsoft for a subscription to their product – I do as well, what is that one different?
An interesting conversation.
As always some + and – ‘s. Major upgrades may warrant a cost, things like a security update, or bug fixes are correcting developer error in most cases and should be free. Subscription may actually reduce the incentive to make improvements, hey, I have a steady stream of cash. Perhaps my biggest problem is with apps that may have user generated data, like a database, financial, personal, etc. what happens if I stop the subscription, is all my data lost? Likely. I already see that on some magazine subscriptions. Don’t renew, you lose all past issues you paid for.