[smalpierre]

I've never seen one of those. I know a dude that's got a leica disto 810, pretty incredible what it can do. Looks like theres some things that moasure can do that the disto can't. Don't like the subscription / post processing thing, but it's the way everything seems to be headed.

 

[smalpierre]

You only have to subscribe if you want direct export to a computer. Free if you want to manually view your phone and transcribe the lengths to CAD.

kinda takes a lot of the "cool' factor out. Should be able to export to computer without monthly fees.

 

[smalpierre]

I know on our end, as the consumer, we want everything free or as as cheap as possible, but this is their business model so that they can actually make an income. I don’t hold that against people since that’s what I have to do to live is find a way to make people pay me.

I'm not saying they should give anything away for free. There are a lot of great use cases for the saas model, and post processing services. I wouldn't want one to be "free for lyfe!" because its not sustainable, the company won't be around long. It's happened to a couple of good pieces of gear - they wanted to provide "free for life" but they ran out of money.

That doesn't apply to something that's a basic software feature like transferring data from one device to another. The features that require post processing? Sure - have to charge for that. But - imagine if you had to pay a monthly fee to Samsung to use the "data transfer" feature of putting files from your computer onto "their" USB thumb drive ... or paying a monthly fee to HP so you could print word docs from your computer to "their" printer that you bought.

 

[smalpierre]

Yeah, it's their software, they can do what they want and charge what they want. No argument there. It's also my money, and I'll spend or not spend it how I want.

I'm not buying a printer that connects to the internet to make sure I've paid the monthly fee in order to print when that's literally the only purpose for the monthly fee - to maintain login servers to make sure I'm paying them the monthly fee.

Likewise, I'm not buying a device that requires me to pay a monthly fee to connect to my computer and transfer data. Unless they're providing something else that really does sort of require that, then I'm fine paying a monthly fee.

I pay monthly for MS365. I have Office installed on a couple of machines, but my main box is Linux, so I'm using their cloud gear so I don't have to install anything. And I get storage, and email, and ... it's a service, not just software. I can share via sharepoint instead of having 100 different versions of the same thing emailed back and forth. It's something they have to maintain, and I WANT them to maintain. So I'm happy to pay them a subscription fee for that.

I'm not sure about this device, but if you have to subscribe to their saas product in order to plug a USB into the device and transfer data to a computer ... I'm not likely to buy that device.