That internet connection for cloud services for smart gear always costs someone.
Smart home devices that can’t be locally hosted or easily made to be locally hosted should be avoided.
There’s no reason a light switch that normally works for 10-20 years will only work for 2-5 due to cloud connectivity.
Luckily for the time being a lot of the providers can be reflashed with Tuyo based firmwares.
The same for software. Even Microsoft is going fully Cloud. Just had problems to activate my MS Office for Mac Business 2019, which I bought in physical. They now require on @outlook.com email address to be able to activate. Otherwise I can't use my "box" software.
Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).
It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.
The Gaben has spoke: "piracy is more about convenience than price"
Just do it. You won't regret it. I also bought office 2016 cheap at some point in time. That's even better. Faster, nicer UI.. just to give you feedback xD
This was like 7+ years ago.
