[photochemsyn]

It's not just Apple - Microsoft may have led the way with the switch from 'purchase' of Microsoft Office Suite to 'leasing' where you had to pay for a yearly fee to maintain access. That's when I decided to learn Linux and installed LibreOffice.

In the older model, you could purchase hardware and associated software and even if the company stopped supporting either, you still had a basic working system that might last for ten years or more with care. You could still send email, type up documents, send to a printer (that's a whole other story now), and have a useful functional tool, even if a lot of the web would stop working over time.

Now it all seems to be about accelerated obsolescence, ensuring products have short lifetimes to force consumers to adopt the latest products. Backwards compatibility gets dropped, deliberate strategies are introduced to force anyone wanting a banking app on their phone to upgrade to the latest model, etc.

My solution has been to switch over to Linux for almost anything computer-related, except for some business things where you have to interact with the Apple/Microsoft world. Unfortunately mobile phones are much worse and you need to keep updating the mobile phone well before the hardware fails, and even there I occasionally contemplate dropping the smartphone entirely... Can't wait for full Linux-on-mobile.

[jodrellblank]

> “Microsoft may have led the way with the switch from 'purchase' of Microsoft Office Suite to 'leasing' where you had to pay for a yearly fee to maintain access.”

This never happened, you can buy office as a one time purchase now and get the version you paid for and nothing else, just like you could with office 1997, here:

Home version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Business version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

- “One-time purchase for 1 PC or Mac”

- “Classic 2021 versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint”