The term this story should have introduced everyone to is: “Trial balloon”
Logitech were just floating a trial balloon, that is all.
I hate AI being intrusive in everything, who needs a mouse button to open the AI prompt!
But also, if you want that, loads of mice have a bunch of buttons you can assign to pretty much anything you want.
Really? Anything??? Can I assign it to bring me self esteme to see myself as worthy of finding happyness? Or will I just remain the same piece of garbage I was before I bought this stupid mouse?
Ya know what? I’m just gonna sleep in the dumpster again. Hopefully this time the garbage men don’t notice me, and compact it down.
If you can automate your happiness with an .ahk script, I don’t see why not!
I mean probably not worth the risk of messing it up, but you could have an automated IV dispense SSRIs or MDMA and then assign that to a mouse button.
There’s definitely a less Rube Goldberg way of achieving the same outcome without a mouse at all though
…I don’t know what SSRIs and MDMA is?
The former is a pretty good class of medication targeting the chemical imbalance that causes your issue. The later is better known as ecstacy or molly.
And none of them require a damned subscription.
I don’t imagine someone will actually pay monthly for a mouse
You underestimate people.
Who the f. has time to manage all these bills, apps, accounts… What’s next, 2FA to sit around for an app to update, so you can sit through a “what’s new” tutorial to unlock a pen just so you can write something down, all for the “convenience” of not having to run out of ink?
You know what people with money and no time do? They buy 20 dumb pens and then just toss one in the trash when it runs out.
The intersection between people who have money to burn and patience to deal with tech bullshit is extremely small.
The parodies write themselves now.
Apple could get away with this. Their cult is slavishly devoted.
Or a keyboard shortcut.
My keyboard cost £10 with a mouse. The keyboard has 104 keys and I would expect it to last at least 5 years. That’s £0.02 per key per year. To be competitive, a subscription model for an AI button needs to be less than £0.00333 per month.
I have a regular old non-AI Logitech mouse and keyboard, and I’m already enjoying the benefits of. Logitech AI:
They should rewrite it in Rust (A safe memory programming language) …
I like Rust, but let’s not encourage them.
The most annoying thing was them adding that bullshit to my current mouse’s software without warning.
Logi AI prompt crap I don’t need or want, that I can’t disable, keeps starting up if I kill the process, eating 5-10% of my CPU cycles.
Thankfully there was enough backlash to knock that on the head and they now let you disable it but they seriously got caught up with their own hype there.
Why pay for something you won’t be using all the time? Why not just pay for it only when you’re using it? Oh–well yeah, you’ll have to buy it first–but then you’ll only have to pay to use it when you want to use it, and only when you want to use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What a fucking breakthrough
Ohhh, you get to pay based on the meters of mouse movement you do. Usage based billing, perfect.
Ooh, then your mouse can stop working when you run out of meters and then you have to buy more to top it up! Excellent.
This guy gets it! 🥂
Mouse usage 🤝 paying for distance used
Well, this is basically all companies. The management are so disconnected from reality.
HAY GUYS LOOK AT HOW CUSTOMERS LOVE HP AFTER THEIR SWITCH TO SUBSCRIPTION PRINTERS. WE SHOULD DO THAT TOO!
–Overheard from the Logitech C-Suite, probably
It’s just unoriginal thinking. What does every business want? Lots of cash that comes in automatically on a known schedule. How can we do that? Have our customers subscribe. What will they subscribe for? Hmm lifetime speakers? Lifetime cable replacement?
Side note business idea: subscription usb power bricks. We send you a variety of cables that work for everything. If one breaks we send you another. $30/yr
Never worry about broken cables again!
See the problem here is the price. At $30/yr that’s worth considering. The problem is they’d charge $30/mth.
You start at $30 which is plenty for the product. Hell the single yearly supply shouldn’t cost that much. Then overtime you slowly increase and changed rates for new subscribers.
Eventually you’ll have to implement location locks - can’t ship cables to more than one addresss. Plus you really don’t want people sharing or giving out cables to friends - so maybe the cables need to be smart and somehow phone home?
That would be nice cause then we could capture some user data and maybe target some advertising
But wait, most people are going to plug these bricks into their phones or tablets, yeah? Those have data connections we could surely piggy back off so rather than a one time or irregular phone home we could have real time data on where the cables are and how they’re being used. And we can release an app they run on their device to capture that information that shows a nice pretty dashboard of when they charge their devices, how much power they use, etc.
We then use that as the justification to move the entire product range to a monthly subscription instead of a yearly one. We can even remove the sharing restrictions to begin with, and then add them back later with a family tier, and eventually prevent cables from being away from the registered home base for a predetermined length of time.
We could then add an upgrade tier for those that do need to use their cables in other locations.
…Is this the kind of logic that goes through their heads?
OMG we need to stop. It’s gotten too real now. The only saving graces are that this is a day old post on Lemmy and so venture capitalists are unlikely to still see it.
But damned if I don’t think Anker could make something out of this.
What have I done?
wails uncontrollably
Surprisingly I could see that being a worthwhile thing for a lot of people I know
My post was supposed to be a dystopian warning, NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL, YOU MONSTER!
It’s probably more “Hey look at what HP got away with. Let’s try it”.
For now.
The first attempt of many, the tech industry will normalise a subscription model alongside the hardware they just need to find the right justification that doesn’t have universal push back. It worked for games, the trojan horse used was (often token) multiplayer addition and it will work in hardware too once they find the right combination.
Isn’t it already like that with tractors and some phones?
once they find the right combination
Car.
For those unaware, already a thing: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature
at this rate, in 20 years some asshole capitalist will figure out how to monetize air as a subscription service and we’ll all be living in a true dystopia
“GIVE THESE PEOPLE AIIIRRR!!!”
Property tax
A feel a little bad for the Logitech CEO here. It was basically a softball question, do you ever think you’ll have software subscriptions, which is a common thing, and he answered “Yeah, that’s possible.”
Obviously for a mouse it doesn’t really make sense, but paid software updates are common in the industry so who knows.
Obviously it’s stupid, but it’s funny to see it play out.
Ya, but they were gonna make me buy a subscription for a mouse!
Pulled back for now, to be retweaked and pushed at a later time
“Forever Pay For Your Mouse”
We already do, with intentionally fast breaking switches. They get away with charging $100 for a mouse, and ensuring a $0.30 part will break long before the devices useful lifetime. Generating mountains of ewaste.
Why can’t they get away with the next step, which is charging a subscription fee to use their mice as well?
That’s a more accurate branding.
Was just a dopey idea in the first place. Nobody replaces a mouse because it’s lacking software features, they replace a mouse when the switches wear out.
And if you can solder you can usually just replace the switches.
Which is planned obsolescence anyways.
It’s not a dopey idea, it’s an enshitification one, and one we will see again because there are no consequences.
Logitech will have subscription hardware, guaranteed. They’ll just go back to the drawing board on how to market anti-consumer practices better.
And similarly are antitrust regulations have done nothing to prevent companies like Logitech from just acquiring all of their competitors and then doing this anyways once there is no more competition. And even using potential competitors into bankruptcy before they can actually compete.
It’s always the same thing.
Corpo push dog-shit idea and receives backlash.
Pull back for a moment, and goes a little bit softer than the last and see if it sticks.If it sticks, it becomes the new standard for every similar corpo.
Rinse and repeat.
Just look at when Bethesda tried to sell a horse armor for Skyrim. Now it’s the norm.
