Published Apr 25, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He's covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he's also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023. He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn't exactly go back together afterward. That's given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he's gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then. Everything seems to be on a subscription model these days, from the tools we use to the places where we store the documents we create. Maybe that's not surprising since the U.S. market was prepared for this by decades of cable TV pricing, but the drain on the average household's finances is real.…