Ryan Sullivan’s tweet, back in January 2020, when the world was a few months away from pandemic-infused chaos, has since been deleted. I had fish to it out using Internet Archive.
Crux? Ryan had a printer he had paid for. The printer had an ink cartridge he had paid for, with enough ink left to print. But because Ryan had canceled his subscription for something called ‘HP Instant Ink’, HP had remotely disabled his printer!
In a news report from April 2022 that referred to a similar incident (a LOT of people have gone through this, incidentally), the publication reached out to HP for a comment and they had to say this: “Cartridges delivered as part of an Instant Ink subscription will only work while a printer is enrolled in the HP Instant Ink service. If the subscription has been canceled, customers can continue to use their printer with standard cartridges and return their Instant Ink supplies for recycling”.
It seems HP remotely monitors the ink levels of the cartridges sold under the ‘Instant Ink’ subscription plan. And HP claims that the service is up to 70% cheaper than buying standard cartridges. That explains why they choose to disable these cartridges.
But as Ryan explains, he had both ‘perfectly good ink cartridges’ and a ‘mechanically reliable printer’ and yet, HP’s subscription policy chose to disallow him from using perfectly valid products.
Meaning: the hardware was willing, but the software was locked due to subscription.
BMW did something similar with their announcement in mid-2022. The car company announced that it would start charging a monthly fee to offer heated seats!
Imagine – you buy a car, with seats that already have some kind of hardware that can heat the seats. But BMW is placing a software lock that it can remotely control to ensure that you pay every month for the privilege of getting heated seats in peak winter!
Mercedes is not far behind in this game. The car brand has launched a subscription package called ‘acceleration increase’ that costs $1,200 per year, and “will enable some of its vehicles to accelerate from 0-60mph a second faster”
According to BBC, “it estimates this amounts to a 20-24% increase in output, allowing a Mercedes-EQ 350 SUV to accelerate from 0-60mph in about 5.2 seconds, as opposed to 6.2 seconds without the subscription”!
According to Mercedes USA, subscribing to ‘acceleration increase’ can ‘electronically increase the motor’s output also increases the torque significantly, giving you a faster 0-to-60 MPH time’!
One could argue that this is not very different from a FitBit that we buy as a gadget and need to join a subscription program to get advanced features like guided workouts, and more detailed data on sleep, among others.
But the direct equivalent of that in cars would be very different – advanced onboard navigation, advanced data on your driving patterns, and so on. They are not dependent on existing hardware that can deliver a certain experience expected of a normal car.
But the definitions of a ‘normal car’ is perhaps changing with the advent of electric, connected cars and hence, these subscription plans that are altering how we think of cars. Or printers.
Imagine how these could accelerate (pun intended).
How about a smartphone at a substantially cheap price and a monthly subscription package for activating 5 messaging apps? Another monthly subscription package to activate 5 social media apps. Yet another monthly subscription to install and activate 5 e-commerce apps. The apps themselves would be free, but you need to pay the phone company or your telecom company to activate a certain number of apps under each category (designated by the phone/telecom company).
Sounds preposterous? Or does it sound preposterous only because we are used to a different free-for-all (in comparison) model? But that’s what software locks allow companies to do – block certain features even in a hardware product that you buy fully and get you to pay on an ongoing basis to unlock as many features as you want.
From subscribing to services, we are moving towards subscribing to microfeatures in products we are used to buying in fully functional modes. They are fancifully called ‘microtransactions’ in industry parlance, and they significantly help the business models of companies. Why? Because they can now factor in a monthly payment stream as against a one-time sale-based income stream!
But going overboard with subscription plans could also unlock an unintended side-effect – the increased interest in jailbreaking hardware. Jailbreaking was already popular in software – paid software products like Adobe Photoshop could be cracked with a code and used indefinitely even without paying the purchase fee once. But why would it be impossible to imagine an after-market jailbreaking service that helps you free the BMW’s seat heating contraption from BMW’s servers and get your own no-subscription, one-time-fee heating system?
Of course, that could void the warranty on the car, and BMW could use that to make you stay off after-market jailbreaking.
But what’s to stop another brand to offer BMW’ish warranties for a monthly fee to jail-broken BMW cars? 🙂
Answer: BMW permanently locks jail-broken cars that start talking to an outside server (owned by the new start-up that offers BMW’ish warranties for jail-broken BMWs).
I reckon things are going to get really, really interesting with subscription plans going berserk.