Comment on The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions
KISSmyOS@feddit.de 3 months ago
“Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently”
This fact, hidden somewhere in the middle, makes the entire article pointless.
Comment on The New Audi A3 Is Amess With In-Car Subscriptions
KISSmyOS@feddit.de 3 months ago
“Or you can just purchase any of those features permanently”
This fact, hidden somewhere in the middle, makes the entire article pointless.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 3 months ago
It still sucks that features are physically present in the car, but you have to pay to unlock them.
laxe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Just like a movie is already available for download on the Internet but you must still pay to download it. Unless yarrr not a fan of artificial scarcity.
JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Sorry what? Did I buy the internet? Is the internet in my garage?
T156@lemmy.world 3 months ago
But the movie is not on the computer in your house.
This would be closer to buying a house, and a washer/fridge are both installed, just turned off, until you pay extra to switch them on.
The hardware and software are already in the car, and you would have already paid for both when buying it. Adding a subscription to enable them after is just skimming off the top.
It might be a different story, if the price included them installing the relevant hardware onto the car separately, but not in this case.
laxe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
We already built the expensive Internet infrastructure that allows any digital media, including movies, to be delivered to your computer for virtually $0 extra cost. However, even though the infrastructure was built you are “not allowed” to access the digital media unless you pay some arbitrary price.
In your example, having a washer/fridge installed in the house is not that different from having an Internet router installed in your house. In both cases the infrastructure is readily available and costs nothing to use but you cannot access the services for artificial reasons.
I’m obviously not defending Audi as I think it’s a ridiculous concept but this is already happening at a large scale.
jabjoe@feddit.uk 3 months ago
That exactly the house white goods in Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread”.