As a side note I feel rent isn’t a good comparison, as these new types of subscription have no bonafide scarcity or cost. While rental properties have real costs: taxes, maintenance, acquisition costs, advertising/agent costs and so on. Charging rent is appropriate because the owner deprives themselves of part or whole of the property (but not its costs) for the renter. This isn’t comparable with a subscription for a keyfob - especially as it’s a feature which has worked just fine without such arrangements.

The subscription approach also doesn’t fix any problems - for example, the Adobe subscription solved the common agency/design headache of receiving files for a more recent version of the software. Whereby one couldn’t drop $20-40k to upgrade their software just to get access to one set of files. A situation made worse if the source of the files is unable to back save them. This allowed big agencies to squeeze out smaller competitors which couldn’t update their versions right away. The subscription solved this problem and is generally viewed as a win/win for adobe and their customers.