I think you’re in the minority. There are products out there that suit you. They are not mainstream products.

I consider my phone scrap as soon as it stops getting security updates. Same goes for almost all proprietary software.

Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.

I'm with you. I also hate automatic updates. Times when I want my software to behave differently from the day before without me requesting it: Zero.

It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.

Windows sells more copies of its software the OEM route. Also, they sell specific versions that eventually end support. Today you might consider Windows almost a loss leader since Microsoft is diversified with many services on top of windows.

Or use "The Dutch Model":

Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.

If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.

This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.

Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.

^^ This. ^^

Choices!

As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.

Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.

Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.

Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?

Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?

> No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.

Blacksmithing, metal working?

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.

We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.

Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.

Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.

If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.

Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.

Plus, BBEdit has a heritage and extremely well rounded and polished codebase. They would not betray their stable business, quality and heritage for some short term gain.

They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.

Yeah, I think I know their business, too. Remember 12 years ago when BBEdit left the Mac App Store only later to come back with subscriptions? Boo.

[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576

[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...

Not a textedit fork, but I am building a minimal text editor with niceties based on scintilla. So performance wise on par with Notepad++ et al.

I won’t disagree with that, but my daily driver is OpenBSD. Emacs is what I got ;)

Yes, and that's universally true for all APIs. All of those have added new features that are widely adopted by other apps, and the older apps can't automagically start using new features without using a newer API, or having code added to take advantage of them.

For instance, an app can't start using Apple Intelligence if it's compiled with an older version of the SDK that doesn't know that such a thing exists. There are some UI exceptions, such as if the OS starts rendering high-level requests like "draw a button" in a newer style. Lots of other things take specific application support, though. MacOS 14 added desktop widgets. Unless an app adds code to configure and deploy widgets, that's not something the OS can do for it. That means that Yojimbo couldn't possibly offer widgets showing, say, the 5 most recently added documents.

If you're OK with not needing or wanting the newer features, and it doesn't rely on some old API that Apple deprecated, then sure, continue to use it! It's still a fine app. But each passing year means that all its updated competitors can do new things that it can't.