Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby nee…
  • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    ‘When you sigh and flip open your laptop to maybe do some work, you find that your software products refuse to even launch, as they absolutely needed to refresh their license key verification this instant. Feeling mildly upset by their accusations of you having pirated their over-priced software after forking over so much cash each month, you slam the laptop shut again. This is when you realize that your project files are stored safely on the now unreachable cloud storage account anyway.’

    • Good thing most of those products have a viable free/open alternative, plus you can still store stuff locally on a PC, you don’t have to put everything on the cloud.

    No, but for example, Office can be replaced by LibreOffice (and the EU is trying to do just that), Adobe CS can be replaced by GIMP or Krita, Inkscape, RawTherapee or Darktable, and Kdenlive for PS, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Premiere/AfterEffects respectively, Maya or 3DSMax can be replaced by Blender, and even Windows itself can be replaced by some Linux distro or alternatively BSD; PC as a platform isn’t locked to Windows, and you’re not locked into proprietary software generally, work contracts or more esoteric stuff which doesn’t have a viable free/open alternative notwithstanding.

    Also, you can still technically buy new cameras and camcorders, although new camcorders have for the most part shifted to the pro video market nowadays, plus there’s always the used market, and you can still build a custom PC although that market has been getting squeezed out by rampant overpricing and the effective evaporation of entry-level parts, plus you can still buy physical music/movies and the gear to play them on.

    And film of all things has been seeing a resurgence as a creation medium lately.

    • alecsargent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      I remember Microsoft revoking my license keys for a 2011 Office Suite disk which were supposed to be a one-time purchase. Since then I gave them the middle finger and installed pirated copies on every single family member’s device.

      They could have had a loyal lifetime customer but broke my trust and now they have a full family of non-customers.

      • FenderStratocaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        That was a typo. I meant to say NOT $800. Sony Walkman has options from $3600 to $400. I want to spend under $100, but I don’t want garbage either.

        • ch00f@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Get a used iPod. Load it with RythmBox, swap the hard drive for a few hundred gigs of SD cards and you’re golden.

        • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          It’s not particularly high end, but I fairly recently bought a Mixxtape MP3 player for $60 new and it works well and can play as a cassette. The gimmick is wacky (but does work), but I mostly got it because I had to switch to a phone without a headphone jack and I wanted something small and inexpensive.

            • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, as I said, it is a wacky gimmick, and it does work. My teen kid got a big kick out of it and at the insane price some of the new artists have been charging to get their music in cassette form, it pays for itself in less than three albums if I already had them digitally.

              I will say again that it is a $60-ish portable music player, don’t expect $1000 Sony gear build quality or interface. I specifically didn’t want some sort of Franken-Android DAP, which most newer dedicated music players are, so it worked out.