In my experience, every good paid iOS app eventually gets copied by someone who releases the clone for free; with games, this was basically a given even eons ago. That being said, a lot of people have been bitten by a paid app that transitioned to a subscription-based app. It's happened to more of my apps than I can count; thank goodness for some grandfathering.
I guess there's less frustration about sunk cost with a subscriptions, but we're also used to so many dark UX patterns that any subscription seems sinister. And I really hate all the apps mandating a trial you have to cancel to avoid getting charged, just to try a damn app.
And lately, we've also seen AI companies demonstrating how fluid a subscription "plan" really is, with features coming and going, and the way credits are counted and spent being unreliable.
If the UX got streamlined, I'd probably feel better about it. Maybe the problem isn't a lack of money, but that all our trust has been spent at this point.
Children aside, this is just an absurd amount of data to hand over.
At least people will realize that age verification is something everyone will have to do to prove they're >16 - not just something <=16yo's will run into.
A lot of the iPhone design decisions have generally had the nature of something I didn't like that some market research must have shown to be in demand. And so the iPhones have kept getting bigger, even though I've held on to my 4, 5S, and SE's for dear life.
People seem to want them, so Apple end up selling them. We're probably in the minority, and I can't fault Apple for not turning down the money.
Although I do wonder how the hell cases and screen protectors work for foldables.
It's very similar to age verification where there's a genuinely horrible problem that we're getting a terrible solution to by people who seemingly don't understand the internet. And the finger on the monkey's paw curls.
Intel's Arc dGPUs were really compelling for dedicated AV1 encode and decode, especially the small form factor of some cards. You could even fit it as a secondary card in a PC dedicated to recording and encode workflows for OBS.
Hope we get a similar option with future lineups that support AV2, especially given how popular video creation and streaming are now.
As tired as I am of the lack of improvement in Dropbox and the most of my nag-mails being warnings about my inactive Dropbox storage reaching "dangerous lows", I can't help be frustrated at how much the equivalent virtual drives from Apple and Microsoft suck, even today.
Everyone's tired of hearing about Kagi, and the good news is that they have a free trial now so you can just see for yourself instead of reading comments after comments about it: https://kagi.com/signup?plan_id=trial.