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If youre sick of paying for subscription services, Tesla has some bad news for you. The EV maker announced Wednesday that going forward, its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software will only be available as a monthly subscription not a one-time payment. Tesla CEO Elon Musk broke the news on X, the social media platform he owns, noting that the shift will happen on February 14. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter, Musk wrote, offering no details about how that change would affect the softwares pricing. While the price of access to Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode has fluctuated over time, the current one-time purchase price for the software is $8,000 or $99 paid as a monthly subscription. Tesla once charged as much as $15,000 for the technology, which promises to intelligently and accurately complete driving maneuvers for you, including steering, making lane changes and parking. The feature requires active driver supervision and doesnt make the vehicle autonomous, Tesla disclaims on the Full Self-Driving website. Teslas decision to flip to a subscription model for its self-driving software may not land well with some Tesla buyers, but its not a total surprise. In November, Teslas shareholders approved an eye-watering pay package for Musk that consolidates even more power at the company with the mercurial billionaire with the promise of a payout that could be worth $1 trillion. One of the pay package milestones Musk must hit to unlock the biggest executive payout in history? Boosting Teslas Full Self-Driving software to 10 million monthly active subscriptions before 2035. Much of Teslas future revolves around the future of its self-driving tech, but Musk has broken many promises about the software along the way. In California, the company is facing legal woes over deceptive marketing practices that suggested Teslas technology was autonomous, even as it required close supervision from a human driver at the wheel hence the softwares current nomenclature: Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Musk has also asserted that Teslas vehicles would be appreciating assets thanks to the self-driving software a claim not borne out by Teslas recent tanking used vehicle prices. Teslas competition heats up Depending on where you look, Teslas competition is either out ahead or catching up fast. Earlier this month, Chinese company BYD bumped Tesla from its top slot as the worlds bestselling electric vehicle maker. Tesla reported that it delivered 1.64 million EVs last year, a 9% dip from the year prior. In the last quarter of 2025, Tesla missed sales expectations, tallying 418,227 sales a decline connected to Trumps decision to kill the hefty U.S. tax credits designed to give Americans a break on qualifying EVs. Tesla, like Musk, has a lot of irons in the fire. The company is also investing aggressively into the robotaxi business, even as its self-driving tech faces scrutiny from federal regulators for reckless behavior. Tesla has a lot of catching up to do on that count, with Alphabets Waymo leading the push into autonomous taxi service across major U.S. cities like Austin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Teslas own robotaxi experiment has yet to impress, based on Fast Companys own firsthand experience. Unlike Waymos own properly self-driving taxis, Teslas robotaxis still come with a human supervisor an awkward compromise and a long way from Musks lofty promises of a fully autonomous near-future.
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Apple was the last champion of the pay once, own forever crowd, a safe harbor for some of the creatives fleeing Adobes monthly ransom. Now it has introduced Creator Studio, its own subscription-based offering that bundles together tools including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage (as well as newly AI-infused productivity apps like Pages and Numbers). There are already two major creative suits out there: Adobe Creative Cloud and Canva. The former is clearly oriented to the high end, enterprise, and prosumer spaces with heavyweight apps like Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. The latter focuses on individual, small companies, and enterprises, with a strong productivity and template-based creative suite that has recently been expanded with free professional creative tools. With Creator Studio, however, Apple has put a bunch of tools into a brown paper bag of confusion: The assortment is too complex for the Canva crowd, yet underpowered compared to the Adobe suite. [Image: Apple] Stiff competition Adobe CC is the true bundle for creators. It covers every industry: design, publishing, motion design, video, audio, and even office productivity via Acrobat. For $70 per monthno perpetual, one-time-payment licenses available anymoreyou get all you need, plus Adobe’s AI, Firefly. In fact, for most people is overkill. Not many people do even a third of what Adobe CC covers. This is why so many people are fed up with their subscription model (worth noting: it still has about 41 million paying users). Canva is an all-in-one bundle for everyday creators: a browser-first suite that makes it easy to design social posts, presentations, simple videos, print materials, and brand kits without needing pro expertise. Its built around a cloud account with a big free tier, plus paid plans ($15/month for individuals and $10/month per user for the teams version) that include AI tools. For a while, Canva was “enough” for 90% of what people make, and anything heavierlike advanced photo compositing, full motion graphics pipelines, high-end audiousually lived elsewhere. Now, however, they added free perpetual licenses for the Affinity suite, which competes with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Both of them are coherent in their focus and power in their own way. That’s not really something you can say about Apple’s new $13 monthly subscription package. Apple is asking us to pay for a hodgepodge of apps where the flagship video editor, Final Cut Pro (FCP), may not even be the runner-up anymore. Outside of very high-end video editingstill dominated by AvidAdobe Premiere Pro sits comfortably at the top of the market share charts with an estimated 30 million users in 2024. I say estimated because Adobe hasnt released official numbers. Like Apple, which last claimed Final Cut Pro had 2.5 million users in 2018. A lot has changed since that year and many video editors now argue that Blackmagic Design’s Resolve is the best video editor (and it is free). [Image: Apple] Another main plate in the Creator Studio is the newly acquired Pixelmator Pro, which Apple is seemingly positioning as its Photoshop killer. If you want a potential Adobe killer, you look at Affinity. Now owned by Canva, the Affinity suite (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is a genuine triple-threat that rivals Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a free (again, there are free options to most of the Apple and Adobe apps) price tag. [Image: Apple] Affinity reportedly added 1 million users in a single week. Pixelmator Pro just cant compete with that. Its a lovely app, but pretending it replaces Adobes pro design tools or Affinity is like saying go-kart can replace a Formula 1 car because they all have wheels. (By the way, if you own Pixelmator Pro, you will be forced to subscribe to Creator Studio because Apple says that your license will not receive any updates. A hint of whats to come.) [Image: Apple] The AI card doesnt cut it To compensate, Apple is dangling “exclusive intelligent features” as the primary reason to subscribe, locking automated toolslike Logic Pros new session players and Final Cuts magnetic maskbehind the paywall. Its a weak card to play, especially when you consider how far behind Apple has fallen in the AI races. Are people going to value access to these AI tools enough to justify Creator Studios $13 monthly payment? Time will tell. And what in the world are Pages, Numbers, and Keynote doing here? These productivity apps were already free and were never pro, no matter how many AI features you add to them. Why would a creative person pay for a free word processor that hasnt meaningfully evolved in years? Or a spreadsheet that is a joke compared to Excel? And sure, Keynote is slick, but have you heard about Canva? Or Google Slides for that matter? [Image: Apple] Who is creator studio actually studio for? So who is Creator Studio actually for? The only logical customer I can think of is someone like a YouTuberyour typical solo creator who edits videos, can cook something in Logic Pro, and needs to slap together a thumbnail in Pixelmator. For them, paying $129 a year is a steal compared to Adobes $600. But thats a narrow slice of the $56-billion creator economy Apple claims to target. Musicians using Logic Pro (perhaps the only Creator Studio tool that still has the crown in its respective industry) probably don’t need a video editor. Video editors using Final Cut don’t need a spreadsheet app. And so on. Judging by this thread on Reddit or this one in an Apple user forum, people seem to agree that this is a bad movepeople are tired of subscriptions. Even fan publications like Apple Insider have slammed the move. Apple users fear that eventually the company will kill the one-time-only licenses and force everyone into the subscription model. While Apple hasnt replied yet to questions about the potential future end of licenses yet (we will update the article when/if they do) its the shareholder-friendly thing to do.
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E-Commerce
“I see a bunch of Americans drinking hot water with lemon and honey, eating congee, drinking hot pot, drinking more soup, eating Chinese vegetables,” one Chinese creator, Emma Peng, recently shared in a TikTok, currently with over 3 million views. “I just want to say that my culture can be your culture. Youre doing really good hydrating yourself. Im proud of you.” The becoming Chinese trend is currently everywhere on the app, and while the name might give pause, its mostly about adopting lifestyle habits rooted in traditional Chinese medicine. In the past month or so, Chinese creators have gone viral for espousing the benefits of common Chinese cultural practices,like drinking hot water, wearing house slippers, and trading cold salads and yogurt for hot congee and boiled apples during the colder months. The comment section, meanwhile, is full of Americans diligently taking notes. Another creator at the forefront of the trend is Chinese American TikToker Sherry Xiiruii. In one viral clip, with 1.4 million views, she announces: Tomorrow, youre turning Chinese. I know it sounds intimidating, but theres no point fighting it now you are the chosen one. Usually, when a trend involves adopting elements from, or becoming, another culture, it is met with cries of cultural appropriation. Some users have understandably expressed mixed feelings about the cultural practices they were once made fun of for now being repackaged and sold as a viral trend. However, in this case the response from Chinese creators is is overwhelmingly positive. Its perhaps unsurprising a trend rooted in self-improvement has gained traction in the first month of the New year, especially given many of the wellness tips and hacks that go viral online have existed for millennia in Ancient Eastern medicine. As one TikTok creator said: All I have to say is what took yall this long to catch on? Still, the appetite for Chinese culture is not limited to TikToks wellness algorithm. “You met me at a very chinese time in my life,” a viral X post from April 2025 reads, a nod to Fight Clubs iconic one-liner. Meanwhile, posts about chinesemaxxingwhich amounts to smoking cigarettes crouched low to the ground and donning toggle jacketsstarted cropping up online throughout 2025. As producer Minh Tran wrote in a recent Substack post titled My Year of Rest and Chinesemaxxing: Part of the reason these videos dont feel like outright mockery is because theres some kernel of truth and desire in the cosplay. Though things have always been made in China, we are increasingly making ourselves in the image of the Chinese. Here, he notes the Labubu mania of 2025. The collectible plush toys, made by Chinese toymaker Pop Mart, were in many ways the standout trend of the year, tripling the companys profits and sparking a buying frenzy that spanned the globe. Or recall when for a brief momentit looked like the Chinese social media platform Rednote would replace TikTok, as users migrated from the platform and bid goodbye to their personal Chinese spy ahead of the potential ban (that never came) over national security concerns. Across tech and other industries, China is the U.S.s closest competitor and, in many ways, its greatest challenger. At a time where America is more divided than ever, and the country’s politics a source of national embarrassment for many, people are looking beyond the countrys borders for alternative ways of living. Given the current geopolitical context, the becoming Chinese trend is perhaps about more than sipping hot tea and house slippers. As Tran writes: The threat of the Chinese Century looms over us all.
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E-Commerce
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