Monday, March 18, 2024
70.1 F
Oxnard
More

    Latest Posts

    Goodbye Constitution Freedom America by Don Jans

    When everything Is Software, You Don’t Really Own Anything

    by Conn Carroll, Washington Examiner

    The MacBook Air I bought in 2014 looks like it is in tip-top condition. It turns on quickly and easily. It runs Safari, Chrome, and Firefox just fine. But if you want to use Microsoft Word or Teams, you simply can’t.

    It’s not that Microsoft products don’t work on MacBooks — I used Microsoft Word on my MacBook for years. The problem is that, even though I am all paid up with Microsoft to download and use the latest version of their products, the Microsoft software updates for these programs are incompatible with the operating system on my computer.

    Apple has chosen to stop providing updates for all 2014 MacBooks. This means, slowly but surely, as more and more other apps get updated, fewer and fewer programs will work on my computer, even though it otherwise works just as well as the day I bought it.

    We see this with cellphones too. If you owned an iPhone 5 and took perfect care of it, it would be a useless brick now because Apple stopped updating the software for it back in 2017.

    If this planned obsolescence were confined to phones and laptops, that would be one thing. But the more automakers stuff computers into your car, the danger arises that your car will become useless well before its parts start breaking down.

    We can already see this in the farmers’ fight for the right to repair the tractors they thought they had bought from John Deere. It turns out that when you buy a tractor from John Deere today, you are also committing to having all repairs done by John Deere. That can be a problem for rural farmers, many of whom must drive two hours to the closest dealership when their tractor stops working. Some farmers have even begun using code from Eastern European websites to hack their own tractors to make repairs. And John Deere isn’t happy.

    But John Deere is not the only corporation looking to change what was once a one-time purchase into a subscription service. All the car companies are doing it — not just the ones you might think, such as Tesla. Honda recently announced it was “shifting focus from non-recurring hardware (product) sales” to “recurring business in which Honda continues to offer various services and value to its customers after the sale through Honda products that combine hardware and software.”

    In other words, car companies are no longer satisfied selling you a car once, with which you are free to do as you please. Now they want to lock you into a never-ending stream of updates and upgrades, all of which come at a hefty price.

    Not only does this concentrate power and wealth in a few car companies, but it kills independent car parts and repair businesses, and it makes it impossible for people to tinker with and modify the vehicles they own.

    It doesn’t have to be like this. Patent and copyright laws are government-created monopolies. If we don’t want to live in a world where everything we supposedly own quickly turns into a useless brick, we are going to need to change these laws.

    The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Citizens Journal


    TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT CITIZENS JOURNAL  Please keep us publishing – DONATE

    - Advertisement -

    1 COMMENT

    0 0 votes
    Article Rating
    Subscribe
    Notify of
    guest

    1 Comment
    Newest
    Oldest Most Voted
    Inline Feedbacks
    View all comments
    Michael Weyant
    1 year ago

    Congratulations for getting 8 years our of your computer. Buy a newer used computer 3 years old.

    Last edited 1 year ago by Michael Weyant

    Latest Posts

    advertisement

    Don't Miss

    Subscribe

    To receive the news in your inbox

    1
    0
    Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
    ()
    x