TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
People already pay these fees for everything from heated seats in their cars to online storage because their locked down garbage mobile OSes won’t let them mount remote directories directly to their file system.
People are terrible at technological freedom and worse at tolerating even minor inconveniences to secure any kind of rights. This shouldn’t even be SLIGHTLY surprising to someone in 2026. We’re reaching the point where someone is going to make breathable air a monthly subscription fee.
I also do not want to mount a network share with the same rights and constant syncing to 8+ devices…
cloud storage actually makes sense if used right. It is obviously overpriced to urge people to buy the larger packages, and sadly there aren’t many self hosted solutions that work as well as Google’s and Apple’s own (whether it be due to platform limitations on iOS or simply an oversight on the FOSS development side), but it’s not as dumb as you’re painting it.
Fully agree with the rest.