from Hacker News

Next BMW might only have heated seats for 3 month

by jor-el on 7/2/20, 8:47 AM with 3 comments

• by daemin on 7/2/20, 11:40 AM

  I guess we really need to examine if we as a society and as buyers of these products want to continue enabling people to sell us physical goods with a software subscription service to continue enabling functionality.

  Do we want to buy physical products that then require a continuous payment to have all the features enabled? Do we then want the trend to continue and have microtransactions for whenever we want to adjust the car seat for example? Or have someone else drive the car?

  Sure it can make manufacturing cheaper to build the same top-end thing and then disable parts in software, but they've been building custom cars for decades now.

  I don't know though, I guess someone that's quite wealthy has a different mindset to me, and wouldn't mind having to pay a subscription fee for every single extra option in their car year after year. But I know that these things will get filtered down from the luxury cars (and luxury goods) down to the ones the common people buy, so I want to stop it before it does.

• by jor-el on 7/2/20, 8:53 AM

  With software-as-a-service becoming widespread and the practice of micro-transactions starting to become common, soon people might start questioning that was digital payment revolution worth it? If made life easy in the starting, but now its turning out to create more headaches. The old way of paying hard cash and walking off was much better.

• by speedgoose on 7/2/20, 8:55 AM

  It will be hacked like the Tesla are hacked.