From the Editor’s Desk: Lifers ⭐

Each morning, I read various publications, most of which are tech feeds or the equivalent. This is a necessary evil because I have to know what’s happening in this industry, and that means I have to conversely endure the mountain of advertising that passes for news these days. Even Apple News+, the trusted, curated news service from that company that values your privacy more than even you do, is a sinkhole of crap.

I find that particularly galling. I pay for Apple News+.

And yet it’s chock full of advertising masquerading as news. It’s always easy to spot, which is part of the aggravation–what am I paying Apple for, again?–and there are some key trends I see every day. One is for apps no one has ever heard of that you can pay for to replace a more expensive or subscription-based solution that everyone knows. But my favorite–OK, least favorite–is a riff on that. These are the ads, or stories, about an app you can pay for to replace whatever else and then use it for life.

For life? Whose life? My life? The life of the device I install it on? How are we defining life here, exactly?

We’re not. But in some cases, I already know the answer just by seeing the headline. For the past year or more, a lot of these ads/stories were about how you could replace an expensive Microsoft 365 subscription with a standalone Microsoft Office suite, a one-time payment, on sale, for a set of apps you could then use for life! Incredible.

Especially incredible is that these ads/stories were specifically for Microsoft Office 2019, a product I knew would soon move out of support. Because I can’t help myself, I call these out sometimes to my wife, who seems to endure my outrage at this silliness better than I do. But the real payoff came this past week when the same publications that were mindlessly shilling Office 2019 to their unsuspecting readers began reporting that this same product, in the words of one publication, was “about to become just about pointless” because users won’t be able to editdocuments using it starting next month on Mac (and in October on Windows). Office 2019 will be read-only after having exited support last year.

So, yes, you can “own” this thing for life. And you can sort of use it for life in the sense that you can launch those apps and look at them, view documents in a read-only mode. But they are no longer the low-cost replacement for a Microsoft 365 subscription you will never stop paying for.

But good news, people! The algorithm has a solution. Microsoft Office 2024 is still available for purchase, and, yes, you can use that for life as well! Left unsaid is that this version of Office exits support this October, so it’s only a matter of time before it, too, becomes the software equivalent of a social media influencer, something that takes up space but is mostly useless and then ultimately just bad for you.

There are other trends I see all the time.

For example, there is apparently a big need for PDF editors that don’t require a monthly Adobe Acrobat subscription. So you can get a “lifetime subscription,” whatever that means, for just $70 that solves that little problem. Or an app with a one-time fee of $39.99. Or one that is “$50 for life.” Or $39 for a tool that lets you edit PDFs “right in your browser.”

For the love of God. Like the Office example, this is the enshittification of journalism and on many levels. The most troubling being that a real tech journalist, a human being with any sense of personal responsibility or self-respect, would tell you that you can just edit PDFs for free and almost no one should pay for a PDF editor of any kind, Big Tech or otherwise. You could even vibe-code one yourself! (Love that.)

What else are these insipid websites advertising to me through my paid Apple News+ subscription that Apple should curate but does not?

There’s the Claude Code course I can save 59 percent on. A never-ending parade of hardware on sale. Discounts I can get ahead of Prime Day, and, wait for, coming soon, discounts I can get during and then after Prime Day. More AI courses. I guess that’s the new push. We all have to learn AI because now that we have so much free time thanks to AI. Or something.

At first, I vaguely hoped that Apple would let me hide this content in some elegant way and never see any of it ever again. But you can’t.

You can block a publication, but these things almost always come from known publications like PC Mag, PC World, Macworld, and so on, and I do want to see some of that content. If you do choose to block a publication in Apple News+, the app doesn’t just not show you those articles, it literally displays an empty gray square where they would normally appear. It’s a new way to remind me of how terrible this space has become.

You can also click a “…” button to choose “Suggest less.” Which, based on the hundreds and hundreds of times I’ve used it, does literally nothing at all, well, beyond adding a little red “thumbs down” icon next to the ad. This is what sending feedback to the Windows 11 team has been like until about 10 seconds ago, a black hole of feedback no one, or no AI, will ever read or act on. Wonderful.

And this is the good news aggregator. God help me when I venture out into the Wild West of the actual web and third-party news feed apps.

Let the deluge begin. For life.