this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
575 points (98.5% liked)

Technology

86633 readers
3434 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
575
Meta is adding ridiculous ‘rate limits’ and a soft paywall to its smart glasses (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by Wispy2891@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
158 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mycodesucks@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 1 points 3 weeks ago

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.