Yes, I am aware. Given my age, the entry point into the "future" might be a little earlier for me than for some on this forum. 😉
My statement was made to illustrate the fact that we really do lease almost everything, and have been for a while.
This is accelerating, however, i.e. we no longer buy music, we lease it via Spotify, Apple Music, etc. We don't buy movies, we rent them on our preferred on-demand service. We don't buy our devices, we lease them through the carrier. Our cars, our houses, even our health can be had for a low, low monthly fee.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, even if it is just an illusion that gives us middle/lower-classers a taste of the world belonging to those that can actually afford to buy everything outright.
I'm not all for it. Leasing often makes less sense for the buyer than buying.
Corporations do everything in their power to give people as little for their money as possible. Some of the tactics can be quite shady.
Unfortunately, the entire world is set up to benefit the people who live in privilege. They run the show and we get whatever we can.
Billie Holiday: "Rich relations give, crust of bread and such. You can help yourself; just don't take too much."
Part of the lease mentality is the idea that people can stop being able to use programs just because corporations have decided they're no longer cool. DRM in video games (and software serialization on the Lisa, a form of DRM) pioneered this problem.
This works in several ways:
1) Companies don't bother to offer backward compatibility in the OS.
2) Companies break backward compatibility via hardware.
3) Companies intentionally remove/block functionality needed to keep the software running.
4) Companies go after people trying to work around the problem, to keep the software usable.
I am very resistant to the attitude that things you own should stop working whenever corporations decide it's convenient for them. It's ridiculous, really. It's like a bank repossessing your home whenever its executives want to. Is that how we really want to live? Eminent domain is bad enough.
Some of the consequences for consumers via the leasing/disposable software mentality:
• Functionality is lost
• Efficiency is impeded
• Nostalgia is blunted (especially sharing fuller experiences with younger generations)
The claim, for instance, that "upgrades" always mean added features and not feature removal is frequently exposed by reality. An example is how one needs Office X in order to import data from Word 5.1. Later versions of Office stripped that functionality, leaving people with Word 5.1 files totally in a lurch. That may be fine and dandy for some executive but it's not for a lot of people. I had to use a file-sharing site to get Office X back so I could get important faculty data from old floppies. This was an old person who can't be expected to be trendy and constantly chase the update train, to keep their data in the loop. Companies want us all to be mice in the wheels, spinning in their "weekly Flash player update" cycle.