Peloton's $3k treadmill now comes with surprise 'subscription fee'(bleepingcomputer.com) |
Peloton's $3k treadmill now comes with surprise 'subscription fee'(bleepingcomputer.com) |
No one should have to do it to use the device but Peletons are actually relatively simple to jail break.
I really don’t see the problem. You don’t have to like it, you can just return it (presumably getting the purchase money back). Vote with your wallet!
I'm not sure it could be any easier.
From a marketing perspective it seems to make sense. If your customers pay a lot of money to buy your product and don't hesitate to connect it to the internet, they are probably wealthy but not very intelligent. Ideal marks for a subscription service.
If you can buy a $3k treadmill, you have money (although about $3k less of it, in fairness).
If you think your treadmill needs to be connected to the internet, you are not particularly intelligent.
Neither of these are controversial takes. We've had enough experience with IoT devices being absolutely god-awful to know this.
Pelton has managed to identify the exact set of people who are rich, oblivious, and like fitness.
Correct, this is one of the reasons why it is not a very good product. Its entire selling point is detrimental.
I've noticed the "fake because" lately seems to be getting more and more brazen from corporations.
This is about the third or fourth "for your safety and convenience we're helping ourselves to more of your money" I've seen in the last couple months, and unfortunately all the other ones I've seen are for products or services I actually have.
But I for one am just grateful that we have so many companies and governments willing to take more of our money, spend less of theirs, extend wait times, reduce services, and just generally do less for more money for our safety and convenience. Imagine how unsafe we'd be if they weren't taking so much money and actually provided service. What a bloodbath it would be.
"For your safety you need to swipe your credit card before your riding lawnmower will go into reverse."
edit: 'the' vs 'a', modern society's worship of abstract concepts is more akin to ancient polytheistic societies than medieval Christianity.
Modern day?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salus
Fun fact: the words "Salus" and "safety" are, in fact, cognate!
Seriously though: if something doesn't really need it, any form of Internet-enabling is something I see as an anti-feature and now avoid at all costs. Internet enabled features or apps means "it spies on you, will change or break needlessly due to an update, or will find a way to extract rent." I will pay more for something without Wifi or (worse) a fucking cellular modem.
I'm worried about the ability to buy a non-Internet-enabled car though. I have a 2013 Nissan Leaf and am looking into upgrading its battery. The car is otherwise absolutely perfect. It just needs more range per charge.
I will never buy appliances, cars, tools, vacuum cleaners, or any other device with any kind of networking functionality. This feature will be used in the future to lock you out of your own hardware, spy on you, serve as a vector for attacks, to restrict its functionality, and to steal that which you have already paid to own. Not if, when.
I drive an ‘83 Toyota pickup, and I will never give it up. Modern cars are trash on multiple levels.
For some reason, the "fake because", even if it is nonsensical is an effective psychological hack.
"Vote with your wallet" doesn't work, because too much of the population are lemmings.
For example, LLBean and REI recently revoked their lifetime warranty referencing “customer abuse” and on web forums people defend the companies. Like somehow after many decades, customer abuse skyrocketed. And there’s no data, of course. And the change went from lifetime to 1-2 years. And it makes them tons more money.
It seems people are less skeptical of corporate blargh.
One way to fix this is to vote for people who believe everyone (including corporations) should pay their fair share of taxes, rather than just the middle class, aka the overtaxed 90%.
The worst part of this story is that the device killed a child and they're using that as the reason to collect monthly ransom. It sounds like a Sopranos episode: Make your monthly payments or we might hurt your kid.
Honestly I look forward to seeing the lawsuits that come out of it, to remind companies that contract law does apply to them.
This is ludicrous. I'm intrigued why it is so difficult to add a 4 digit passcode to a device that regularly receives software updates. It seems that bricking the device was an easier fix than a bit of coding.
One of the benefits of IOT is the ability to provide regular updates & "improvements", however the first benefit of IOT is to earn as much money as possible for the suppliers and that typically steers product decisions.
It probably is not, but that was a great excuse to make users pay for non-trivial features instead of just advanced.
No other solution to keeping toddlers off of a treadmill with a giant touch screen?
Maybe a simple math question or 'confirm your birthday'?
No no... gotta cash-grab to pay for the lawsuit.
Classy.
Feds pressured Peloton to "voluntarily" recall their device so now they're making up the difference by jacking up the subscription fees.
I generally do not understand the thought process of buying a tablet glued to a treadmill for three thousand dollars. That's like what, a decade of gym membership
The idea being that people won’t own anything except (maybe) their clothes.
Well, certainly a lot less trouble for the kids when you kick off.
I’m just waiting for them to go ahead and implement a privatized social credit score too at this point.
Non corporations love it too.
I wonder if customer protection laws in the US can force them to revert their update.
Apparently, what you are buying is an obligation to buy a recurring subscription.
The genius in getting people to spend a lot up front to so burden themselves is that the more they pay, the less likely they are to walk away from it.
The former would be absolutely reprehensible. It’s ransomware, in the name of a death caused by your product.
If it’s the latter, they absolutely blew it while communicating this.
The likely scenario to me is somewhere inbetween. They are seeing how people react to this and were intentionally ambiguous to give themselves an escape hatch if there’s backlash.
What does it mean to shed a customer that payed for a device and you have no ongoing relation with?
Alternatively, They will pay and schedule a company to come to your house and relocate the device somewhere away from children and pets.
To reference a cliche, I think Peloton turned up the heat a little two quickly and the frog jumped out of the pot of water. But they will learn to go more slowly in the future, the same way that we see people lazily subscribing to multiple $5.99 streaming TV channels, ultimately costing more than cable.
Can we go back to 1995 when $9.99 VHS exercise tapes were still an option?
Exercise DVDs in that price range (same nominal price, substantially lower real price than $9.99 in 1995 dollars) are readily available and DVD players are cheap.
"As a reminder, under the terms of our voluntary recall, Tread+ owners can return their Tread+ for a full refund by contacting Member support,"
Though who would want to own that death trap is beyond me.
I wish it were a common knowledge that proprietary IoT devices are related to planned obsolescence, and therefore are bad for environment. The climate and environment activists have a stronger voice than consumer rights or privacy activists. It would be nice to join forces and lobby laws against this kind of predatory behavior.
The point of a Peloton is to do the classes, either for running or spinning, which require a subscription. It would be silly to buy a premium device who's point is to use the subscription based features and specifically intend to use it without the subscription. Just buy a similar treadmill from another company.
I think you could have stopped there.
The business model appears to be: sell an expensive hostage, justify ramping up recurring ransoms by threatening to kill the hostage.
What if they go out of business?
I can't imagine paying this much money to _just_ run. Okay, run and have someone encourage me. I get that they're successful, and lots of people seem to want a treadmill or bike that doesn't move, but I don't personally understand it. I'm starting to feel old fashioned with my workout technology, shoes and shorts.
"Just run" is tracking your metrics. You can STILL use the treadmill without it, you just won't be getting information on the run like your pace, calories burned, power output, etc. The treadmill isn't bricked, it's just not providing metrics. If you have a garmin watch or insert fitness tracker you can still get info from that.
I can understand why people would be annoyed by this change, and I would hope they add the functionality back in the future. But everyone saying it's "bricked" needs to take a deep breath.
My wife bought one in November 2019, and both joined the "century club" (100 rides) by the middle of 2020 and she takes the Yoga classes as well and I have done a few strength classes- its not just about the bike. We had never previously had a gym membership, though I would use the one in my previous apartment building, and my wife was into both Yoga classes and Soul Cycle.
I hate group fitness and cycle studios, and am currently on a 65+ week streak on Peloton. The value is there for me, and even outside the pandemic, my wife hasn't stepped foot in a cycle studio since it was delivered.
I understand the value proposition of an internet-connected "virtual class" for motivation, competitive pacing, social gaming, etc but my limited research showed that one can get these benefits with just the Peloton app[1] (the software) without buying the hardware (Peloton branded bike/treadmill).
The big disadvantage with the whole Peloton hardware+software integrated package is them changing the Terms of Service on the customer at any time to raise prices. (E.g. this thread's topic of abruptly removing treadmill's "Just Run" $0 cost option.)
Is the DIY option with your own bike/treadmill with an iPad running the Peloton app too awkward that it makes the integrated Peloton the better value? Or are buyers simply not aware of the options?
You: "The bike is more like $2000 at least for the standard bike, not $3000."
Did you not read that this is not about the bike, but the treadmill?
I can even understand people paying $200+/month for an Equinox gym. At least it's unlimited use.
But paying $35+ for a single one hour spinning class?
I'd add their are things that are much more expensive people spend money on that are much less likely to result in happiness. Buying a fast-depreciating Mercedes or BMW for example.
I have no issue spending $60k+ on a car because I like to drive and a nice car makes me happy every time I get in. There is no way I'd buy a Peloton though: I absolutely hate all fitness classes. I'd rather spend $3k on dumb equipment than $1k on "smart" equipment with classes.
I'm noticing more and more a trend for people to spend seemingly large amounts of money on completely pointless things. Out of curiosity I checked how much people are spending on custom number plates for their cars in the UK. They are regularly going for tens of thousands of pounds. For a few numbers that other people get to see on their cars.
My theory is, despite the nominal amounts being very high, the opportunity cost to the buyers is very low, but it's not because they are "rich". There is such a huge gulf between being "well off" and being "rich" that it's quite easy for many people to save up a spare ten thousand and just not have anything better to spend it on. To make serious life changes, like a new house, you need hundreds of thousands to millions. Suddenly that ten thousand is a drop in the ocean. Faced with not a chance of ever reaching "rich", people remain "well off" and spend these paradoxically large but tiny amounts of money on pointless things.
I honestly cant believe how strong the marketing of Peloton is. It's the iPhone of exercise equipment.
It really is.
> I know buying a good exercise bike, monitor (which they may already have), and a subscription to some cycling class service or box set isnt a sexy solution but damn is it so much cheaper.
circa 2007 you could say a similar thing about the iPhone
This nails it. The startup tech boom has a large contingent of, "how can we take a cheap device, cloud-it-up, add some design, and sell it at 20x the price to the bougie?" I literally stay awake at night trying to think of something I can modify and sell to rich people.
And by "rich" people, I mean people in the 10% and above income brackets, or people that will go into debt to have the latest gadget.
Examples:
- Car-rooftop tents
- Fancy blenders
- Super-expensive coolers
- Deluxe earphones
- Deluxe vacuum cleaners
- Deluxe portable fans
- Deluxe juice machines
- Deluxe "man kits" (yes, its a thing: https://www.mancrates.com/, https://manlymanco.com)
...
I am racking my brains to come up with the next fancy thing...
Do you not understand why they would rather buy a treadmill than train at the gym, or why they don't buy a cheaper treadmill?
If your company has $100000/month in MRR but manages to make $100M in a year, it's a $1.2M/year company.
Subscriptions/MRR happen to be a good way to get profitable growth, but that doesn't mean it's not possible otherwise. In fact subscriptions may be obfuscating otherwise poor economics, and I suspect that many customers are going to get subscription overload, or reach the end of nice introductory terms, and churn.
Some investors might be looking exclusively at MRR, but they are likely shortsighted. If too many value MRR and don't value other revenue, there will be plenty of valuable investments to be had in non-subscription companies and the market should rebalance.
Its not even a full hour, the standard class is 45 minutes IIRC.
Pricing like this happens when there are enough people that can afford it without thinking about it, and they don't want to be surrounded by people who can not afford it.
It's a smaller scale version of a town with very high taxes, and no extra benefits for those taxes.
On the flip side, I wonder who bought a Peloton treadmill and didn't intend on getting the subscription service. Not that it makes it right, but I imagine most people already pay for it and the number of affected users is quite low.
On the one hand I appreciate the stuff a company like Apple does around privacy, but on the other they comply with whatever laws are in place in a given country. So we have to hope the state of our democracy improves because effectively becoming a one-party state changes the game — then we actually have to worry the government will encourage or mandate dystopian systems like this. Good actors in the private sector won’t be good enough to mitigate if that happens.
https://www.intact.ca/en/personal-insurance/home/group/mydri...
Seems like their customers would not be happy if that was the case. Conversely, would be extremely wasteful if they don't.
What do they do with returned equipment?
Im not sure I follow what you mean by "used" what disclosure you are referring to.
>What do they do with returned equipment?
Probably either scrap them or refurbish re-sell. This would be similar to when car manufacturers issue a recall with a buyback option.
[1] Yes you can have non-Google subscribed Android devices, doesn't mean that Google is banking on all but an insignificant portion of users doing that.
No data is stored on the company hardware, it's all in the cloud.
I don't know how widely spread this is, but even before the pandemic my company had a gym benefit and it can be applied to Peloton. I didn't know that going in though, I just had a discussion with a coworker after we got it where they told me that.
And yeah, when I was in my younger years when I had more time than money, I might have cobbled together some solution like you are suggesting, but these days, I can pay for the nicely integrated solution that I don't have to debug or worry about.
I hear the Wahoo Kikr is great for cyclists: https://www.wahoofitness.com/devices/bike-trainers/kickr/buy
In practice, it took me a few workouts to translate the resistant callouts from the Peloton to the Keiser. Also, some instructors are better than others about repeatedly calling out cadence and resistance. You can get lost in the workout if the instructor doesn't call them out enough.
For some people, this is quite valuable.
As a side note, the video downloading is made available in the mobile app as well.
Gives you all the features of YouTube Red - including the ones that were available BEFORE Google silently removed them to put them behind a paywall, like background play!
Also includes experimental features to use crowdsourced data on where ads are in videos and automatically skips them if desired.
Engineers hate these things because they know the relative minimal efforts required, and that the line of free vs premium feature is completely arbitrary.
You have no idea how much of a positive impact this exchange has had on my summer! Thank you, stranger! :D
Oh my goodness!