Technology

'When you sigh and flip open your laptop to maybe do some work, you find that your software products refuse to even launch, as they absolutely needed to refresh their license key verification this instant. Feeling mildly upset by their accusations of you having pirated their over-priced software after forking over so much cash each month, you slam the laptop shut again. This is when you realize that your project files are stored safely on the now unreachable cloud storage account anyway.'

• Good thing most of those products have a viable free/open alternative, plus you can still store stuff locally on a PC, you don't have to put everything on the cloud.

No, but for example, Office can be replaced by LibreOffice (and the EU is trying to do just that), Adobe CS can be replaced by GIMP or Krita, Inkscape, RawTherapee or Darktable, and Kdenlive for PS, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Premiere/AfterEffects respectively, Maya or 3DSMax can be replaced by Blender, and even Windows itself can be replaced by some Linux distro or alternatively BSD; PC as a platform isn't locked to Windows, and you're not locked into proprietary software generally, work contracts or more esoteric stuff which doesn't have a viable free/open alternative notwithstanding.

Also, you can still technically buy new cameras and camcorders, although new camcorders have for the most part shifted to the pro video market nowadays, plus there's always the used market, and you can still build a custom PC although that market has been getting squeezed out by rampant overpricing and the effective evaporation of entry-level parts, plus you can still buy physical music/movies and the gear to play them on.

And film of all things has been seeing a resurgence as a creation medium lately.