Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/06/miku_baby_monitor/?td=rt-3a
You’ve just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription | Once upon a time there was a company called Miku who wasn’t making quite enough money…::Once upon a time there was a company called Miku who wasn’t making quite enough money…
Subscriptions are a plague on our society. No wonder piracy is on the rise when even simple apps require a fucking subscription.
Or when a product requires an app to function instead of just putting some buttons on the thing. The apps also tend to want access to everything too. 🙄🤦♂️
Because the device you bought is just a gateway for the company to access the real product, you. You’re paying them so they can access your information.
The sad reality of today.
Solvable: just put these apps on an old smartphone with nothing else on it and that you don’t use anymore then put it on the guest wireless network without access to anything else 😁
Good luck to look for something is not there…
Don’t use a baby camera that is connected to the internet. Use one with a monitor that is connected to the camera in a local encrypted signal.
There are. We only use a local analog camera/monitor for our youngest one now, fuck the internet-enabled ones.
For our first baby, we had an Owlet setup originally because of the smart sock for newborns (the sock monitors the baby’s heart rate/oxygen levels and alerts you if it drops below a certain bpm/%) and it came with a camera as well. While it was nice to be able to remote view the camera from anywhere whenever family members were babysitting for us, it was so damn glitchy and unreliable (the camera, at least the sock never gave us issues). I can’t tell you how many god damn times that shitty camera would simply just die and you’d have to sneak into the nursery like a ninja in order not to wake the baby you just spent an hour trying to get down only to get back to your room and realize the fucking monitor isn’t working… Fuck Owlet.
Oddly, there was no monthly subscription, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s changed now.
We have an owlet with the camera and sock. No subscription yet but also no problem with the camera.
I don’t really feel baby monitors are really even needed unless you have a large house . With my son I used an old phone as one when I would go across the hall to my neighbors apartment for a couple of minutes. If I actually bought one it would of been a big waste of money. I used to work for a company that did warranties for toys r us and alot of people would speed hundreds on special chairs it a machine that mixes and heats up formula . I used a little chair I got for free and a bottle warmer that was like $15 .
We never even warned bottles. Some people were shocked to see us pull a bottle straight out of the fridge and give it to our daughter but I didn’t see any reason to warm them when she was perfectly happy with child milk. I’d rather not have to worry about overheating it or having to lug around a bottle warmer when traveling.
I do like the monitor though but it’s more of a convenience and piece of mind thing than a necessity. Being able to see her means we know if that big thud was her kicking the wall vs falling out of her crib without getting up and running into the room. We almost always keep the volume muted though, it’s a small house and we can can hear her just fine except for if we’re both outside.
The advice I give other parents is to not buy anything but the absolute basics until you really need it because a lot of things you think you’ll need you probably don’t.
Three kids in our house. All slept in their own bed from day one. We didn’t have any baby monitor. Miraculously everyone survived.
Your 1-day old babies went completely unsupervised? Or just not with baby monitors? Because those are pretty different things.
Your house must be very small, quiet or have thin walls. That, or you didn’t get bothered by babies crying in their rooms.
Our camera was a wireless IP cam that connected to the LAN but not the greater internet.
We felt this sting, we purchased the miku because of the monitering and now they want 10 bucks a month for what used to be included in the purchase of the device. Now all the features are blocked.
Can you return it? Or write thr company and request a refund?
This is a bait and switch, which a judge would award damages on if you bothered with a small claims filing.
If you used a credit card you should contest the charge on your card and throw the thing out.
I had 3 babies and spent $0 on video monitoring. Your baby will be fine. Don’t fall for the advertising drama. Babies have been fine for thousands of years with no electronics.
They’ve also not been fine.
SUID Death rate for infants has decreased even since 1990. Baby monitor likely had a role in that.
FYI not supporting subscription for features a device has in hardware, just saying I’d rather have a monitor that never went off than no monitor and a dead child. There are plenty of alternative devices without subs that cost a lot less to begin with.
You know what else happened in the 90s? Leaded gas was banned. I’ll attribute it to that. Anecdotes don’t mean much.
I can just hear some people going, “WHAT? Are you crazy?”. I was a little tike in the early 60s and the only monitor my mom had was me screaming or the “THUNK” of me falling and hitting the floor.
I used a normal webcam to monitor my baby and, honestly, I was so paranoid that I don’t regret it. Seeing her breathe or move before I went to bed and when I woke up was a comfort and relief.
And only a few children were kidnapped by the Fae.
What about the ones that were left in the cold for being sickly?
I’m cancelling subscriptions like crazy, I don’t have any streaming TV subs left at all. I guess I will have a subscription to Jetbrains editors though since they are actually worth it.
I got rid of Reddit!
Yep, the problem with subscriptions is the subscribers
There are very few services worth paying for monthly, but if people keep paying, companies keep moving to subscription models
+1 to JetBrains.
I started using them like 8 years ago and have never looked back. My dad introduced them to me when I was doing some homework on a family trip and my laptop was dead. After that, I used them for every class in college, then used them at a job where they didn’t provide an IDE but I had the subscription.
Even when I’m not developing at home consistently, it’s just so much better to have it than not.
I’m not sure why people bother with these. I used a wireless IP camera that could be viewed from pretty much any device, required no subscription and had better quality than most baby monitors.
The baby monitor passed down through our family was said to have been excavated from Pompeii and has cost us $0 dollars over several generations, not counting electricity cost of charging eneloops and Ikea ladda batteries.
I have a baby monitor, and considered using an IP camera before buying it. The reason I like mine is because I’ve got a separate little handheld monitor on RF instead of wifi. There’s a handful of situations where it’s fine in very handy. Our nanny could use it without us having to set her up with any tech. Works while traveling without having to deal with hotel Wi-Fi or hot spots. Works outside much further than my wifi reaches. I like the RF.
I used an IP camera for my first two, using a baby monitor like yours for the third. I prefer the non-IP monitor too. All the reasons you list, plus reliability. I don’t have to worry about my baby monitor crashing in the middle of the night like I did with the IP cam app.
Because there’s massive marketing spend to make everyone feel like subscription services are the only option. Because all the investment in development is only in efforts with rent seeking subscription crap.
We could have easy plug and play local interaction or for remote operation, a self hosting platform. Instead you generally have to carefully research until you find some brand that is amenable, maybe flash over their firmware with a custom image, and put the pieces together yourself in something like homeassisstant. There’s nothing preventing companies from making local management as easy as cloud management except the rent seeking.
We did the exact same thing. The night vision worked well and it gave me peace of mind every night and every morning.
Same enshittification that got Drawboard PDF
This really irks me. Paid, and then they make the app shitter and put basic functions behind the paywall.
I would gladly pay for a new and improved version of the app (likely every now and again I admit).
I will never pay for a PDF editor on a subscription basis.
Yeah, absolutely not. Drawboard was cool. It was a real loss. And also infuriating that I “bought” it, only to have the app lock me out of “premium” features later.
In Soviet Russia, baby monitors you!
Just buy a non Internet-based product that uses wireless radio and a dedicated display about phone sized.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I forget the name of it, but a number of years ago, there was a startup that wanted to make communication devices for hikers. They could transmit short messages to each other. Anyway VCs came in and asked, where’s the MRR? We’re not investing unless there’s monthly revenue.
It’s all just greed. You can’t just have a device and be good. Investors are constantly chasing the quarterly growth.
It’s disgusting.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s modern capitalism.
Making 10 million a month for 10 years isn’t as good as going from 1 million a month up to 10 over five years.
The important part isn’t the total profit, it’s the increase in stock price.
This leads to a churn of companies as they’re pushed past the breaking point because by then investors have sold and moved on to the next.
The only companies that survive are huge corporations that buy up smaller ones to do the same process.
hansl@lemmy.world 1 year ago
American society decided that the GE model was not only working, but needed to be generalized.
bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A lot of people don’t understand that GPS requires no cell service to function, so it’s no surprise that many accept that they have to pay monthly for a "service* that has no ongoing support costs to the seller.
porksoda@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Correct if I’m wrong, but GPS doesn’t allow for communication. Not sure I understand what you’re saying.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And even when you do make such a product, there’s overwhelming marketing spend against you to make sure no one knows about your product.
It’s massively frustrating to just want to make good products but knowing that the wider business context demands that you get recurring revenue or otherwise it is imperative that you fail. Your success would fundamentally undermine rent seeking, and that’s a bigger existential threat than any other mere competitor.
Madison420@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Aprs already exists and is optimal for hikers. A relatively lightweight base station at good height can get you hundreds of miles pretty reliably or tens of thousands of miles if you really really try and get lucky.