It makes some sense for business & enterprise stuff, but not for household/consumer computers & devices. That’s just rent-seeking and forced obsolescence. There is no good reason a home computer from the past fifteen years should have security patches withheld because the manufacturers want people to throw them away and buy and brand new ones.
I kind of get it, but I feel like even in a b2b context you shouldn’t be allowed to charge a subscription for something as low level as the OS.
Now if Microsoft wants to offer paid support subscriptions for business customers (they might already do, I didn’t look) that I would be fine with.
Of course, businesses would just pivot in the other direction and speed up the release cycle to every year or two, making smaller and smaller improvements. No system will be perfect. I just hope we get to a better solution than “constant vigilance” eventually, whatever it looks like.
