Probably a lot more subscription based stuff. People don’t flinch about spending $50-$100 on their phone subscription but email, which is equally important, people expect it to be free from places like Google.

I don’t want to be that person and bring up this argument which isn’t answering your question but does big tech need to be funded? There is great open source alternatives to most big tech which are either ran by volunteers or funded by donation. They would be so much better supported if big tech alternatives did not exist.

Big tech selling hardware would still be funded that way. Apple, Lenovo, etc etc would be similarly funded. Microsoft sells licenses to their operating system.

I would argue the world would be a much better place if big tech wasn’t funded and open source projects were king.

Lemmy users trying not to make every single post about US poltiics challenge (impossible)

Of course, that’s why I sum my spreadsheets by hand with pen and paper and then enter the total back into the sheet

I thought of it as grading as in an academic setting. If the top commercial models are putting out essays that are graded at 100%. The on prem models are putting out results that are graded at 90%. In the case of support emails, the results won’t be much different.

My friend bought one of those, paired with I think 64gb of EMMC storage which is basically an SD card. It couldn’t browse the internet really with Edge in it’s default settings. I had to disable so much crap but I got it usable with Firefox.