Subscriptions for Everything

The Apple Watch Series 3 was announced. Its hot new feature is built-in LTE, which means uses no longer have to have it tethered to their phone for it to function. However, enabling LTE requires yet another subscription:

An Apple Watch Series 3 will cost you $10 per month on your cell plan, and it appears that all US carriers will offer three months of free service (a $30 credit). However, we’re still waiting for confirmation from Sprint.

AT&T and Verizon are also offering free activation (a $25 and $30 fee, respectively). T-Mobile will waive its $25 new SIM card kit fee. We’ve reached out to Sprint for their activation fee policies and will update when we have more. It’s interesting that the Apple Watch Series 3 is $10/month on Verizon, when other smartwatches cost $5 on their plan.

I’m starting to think that I’m the last person on Earth who doesn’t want a subscription plan tied to every damned thing I own.

This is a slight digression from yesterday’s post but it seems to be that more and more products are finding ways of tying subscriptions to them. Ulysses, a popular text editor, announced last month that it was changing to a subscription model. Several years before that Adobe announced that its products would change to a subscription model. We’re entering an era where ownership, even in a limited form, is being replaced by renting.

Don’t get me wrong, subscriptions make sense for some services. For example, cellular services rely on an infrastructure that needs constant maintenance. But we’re quickly approaching a point where every manufacturer is finding some way to attach a subscription plan to every product they sell. At this rate we’ll soon have to pay a subscription to keep our cars running.