With the news that AOL will shortly be in the hands of Verizon in a $4.4 billion cash deal, an era that began in the early days of the Internet is coming to a close. Now the tech pundits and financial community will no doubt be discussing this transaction for days, but I’d prefer to take it personal.

In 1989, shortly after setting up a brand new Mac system for my home office, I received a tiny cardboard envelope in the mail from a place called America Online. Inside was an offer to try out a brand new online service for the “low price” of $4.00 per hour. At a time when you paid up to $22.50 per primetime hour for the main rival, CompuServe, AOL’s “bargain basement” price may have seemed really cheap.

Now many regarded AOL as the “kindergarten of the Internet” because of its relatively simple graphical user interface. In fact, the service was pretty well confined to its own walled garden in those early days, and true Internet access was only added some years later. But then it was a pleasant and friendly place, and I quickly sought out the new Mac forums and found myself deeply involved in the back and forth discussions.

Over time, my bills climbed, but a content producer took pity on me and kept granting me credits. Finally he got me a gig as a member of one of the Mac support forums in exchange for a free account. Later on, I became the leader of a forum, a paid gig. A couple of years later, I got two forum leader gigs thus doubling my salary, though it was still rather less than a living wage.

At any rate, my presence on those forums attracted attention in high places. Macworld signed me up as a contributing writer of reviews and features, and I got the first of many book gigs in response to an email from a publisher looking for someone to handle a title on, believe it or not, AOL.

While AOL rose to the top of the online heap, efforts to add a web browser and access to other Internet services proved less successful. With the growth of broadband at prices not much higher than AOL’s flat monthly fee, many of us saw the beginning of the end. AOL even cut back on the Mac forums, so I eventually found myself without the paid gigs by the late 1990s.

Due to the dot-com bubble, AOL found itself with an artificially high market cap, and leveraged its overwrought value to acquire the media giant, Time Warner, in 2000. For a time the company even became AOL Time Warner, and AOL CEO Stephen Case was praised as the consummate financial genius. Or an expert at corporate shenanigans.

For a while.

The bubble burst, and the country went into a recession. According to published reports of the time, AOL was ultimately forced to take a $99 billion write-off, a record for the time. As broadband Internet spread across the landscape, AOL shed millions of customers.

Soon it was Time Warner all over again, and AOL was unceremoniously spun off. To many, that was the beginning of the end for AOL, but somehow the company lived on as an “online” portal, though one expects they were merely waiting for the right suitor.

Believe it or not, as of the time Verizon made the deal to take over AOL, over two million people were still using it to get online.

Now the transaction is touched in the usual vague terms about Verizon using AOL as part of its “over-the-top” video capability. That appears to signify distributing TV content online, in the fashion of Netflix. So is that Verizon’s intent? Did it really require shelling out $4.4 to buy AOL, or could they have simply used their own vast server network?

By the way, AOL also owns such online news outlets as The Huffington Post, and one wonders how long founder Arianna Huffington will remain with the company. Also, I wonder how the publishing assets will fare under Verizon’s ownership, particularly if, for example, one of these outlets, such as Engadget, decides to run an article critical of the parent company. Or will these divisions end up being spun off some time in the future?

While I have kept the very same aol.com email address all these years — and you can guess what it is — I do not have AOL Internet access, though I technically still have a press account. I also do not feel warm and fuzzy toward the company. When I worked for them, they occasionally screwed me out of promised raises and made other promises they failed to keep. At one time, in fact, AOL had to apologize to customers of poor service and other lapses. They were not always squeaky clean in their dealings with the paying public.

I also wonder, at times, why anyone would still be paying an estimated $20 or so per month for dial-up access in 2015, but I realize some people reside in remote parts of the country where there are no viable alternatives. Or perhaps they dutifully pay that bill without realizing there are far better sources for online access.

I also wonder whether, in another year or two, the name AOL will simply vanish in the dustbin of history regardless of how Verizon handles this acquisition going forward.

Years ago, the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, proudly proclaimed that people wanted to own their music. In touting the iTunes Music Store, he said it was the best way to get the music you want at affordable prices. For the music industry, the iPod and iTunes were salvation for a time. Stung by loads of people downloading pirated music, this was a way to rebuild the industry’s income stream.

Of course things change.

Now Steve Jobs wasn’t always correct in his prognostications, or in his suggestions about what people liked and didn’t like. Sometimes Apple was working on a solution and attacking existing gear was merely done for marketing reasons. But Jobs also told us that you didn’t want a small tablet. After he left this mortal plane, Apple released the iPad mini. Since then, the tablet space was also served with the extremely popular iPhone 6 Plus with an even smaller display.

Before the iPhone phablet appeared, people at Apple disputed the value of larger smartphones, and the main argument, certainly true enough, was that one-handed use was impossible or restricted. Way back in late 2004, at a quarterly conference call with the financial community, Apple executives said they’d never produce a low-cost PC, saying they were all junk.

In January 2005, Apple introduced the Mac mini for $499.

As I said, marketing considerations may influence the reaction to a specific product or service, but quite often things change. You expect, then, that Apple will respond.

So after years of success in the digital music download business, sales are on the decline and it appears that more and more people want to get their music via subscriptions to such services as Spotify and even Beats Music. According to a published report citing Warner Music Group, it appears sales from streaming music have finally surpassed sales from actual downloads.

What this means is that, if the trend holds true for other music companies, more and more people have decided they’d do better off paying roughly $9.99 per user per month to get unlimited music streaming. But don’t forget that price is for one user at a time. If you have a large family, it can get a little expensive. At Spotify, it’s $29.99 for five users. If you are a member of a larger family, I suppose you have to get more than one account to accommodate your needs.

Contrast that to being able to buy just one track or album from Apple for your nuclear family of up to six people. Yes, I realize that privilege is easily extended with the sharing of devices, and don’t forget the venerable CD. Regardless, when you buy your music, you keep your music. With a subscription, when you stop paying, the music dies, except when there’s a version with ads, in a sense a music radio station without the DJ chatter.

It has been widely reported that Apple is busy rejiggering Beats Music to become an iTunes branded service, accompanied by an enhanced iTunes Radio. Supposedly new agreements are being sought with the music industry. It was even reported that Apple wanted to find a way to cut the price from $9.99 a month to, say, $7.99 per month, but that wasn’t the way it turned out. It seems that the music companies wouldn’t accept terms that would allow for a lower price. I suppose the theory goes that cheaper subscriptions might mean more subscribers and hence more revenue.

Of course, none of that has ever been confirmed.

Now what we see here is a sea change in the music industry after a very long time. The original phonograph was invented in the 1870s. By the late 1960s, vinyl’s first successful mass market replacement, the compact cassette, offered a convenient way for you to play recorded music in a car or a portable device. Yes, there were efforts to put record players in cars with very mixed results.

By the 1980s, CDs appeared and ultimately took over, though to this very day, there are vinyl diehards who insist that the analog LP delivers a far more satisfying musical experience. Or maybe listeners feel comforted with the soft surface noise and the crackles and pops. It starts to sound like a breakfast cereal, though I understand vinyl’s attractions, even though the vinyl recording may be sourced from the same digital master recording used for the CD, specially mixed for the specific LP needs.

But through it all, people bought their music, traded their music, sold their music often in exchange for other music. When digital took over, you could put an entire music library on a tiny digital device, such as the iPod and later the iPhone and the iPad, plus loads of competing devices. Unless the music was freely exchanged, or offered for free download, it was still something you bought and paid for and kept.

While you don’t expect Apple or other successful companies to go out of business, what if one of them does, or chooses to abandon the service, and thus your streaming music library is no longer available?

Now having lived through the vinyl, compact cassette and CD eras, and having settled on digital downloads for most of my current purchases, I cannot imagine the wisdom of a subscription service. There have been times in my life when even a small monthly fee may not be small enough, and I don’t want to lose my music.

Clearly the public has other ideas, however, if sales from Warner Music apply, more or less, to the entire industry and the trend continues. Apple and the companies will do what’s necessary to serve the needs of their customers. But I won’t be one of those customers.

The recent rounds of speculation about OS 10.11 suggest it’ll be a catchup release, in the spirit of OS 10.6 Snow Leopard back in 2009. Instead of packing in loads of new features, some seemingly barely tested, Apple may focus mainly on stability, performance, and some improved under-the-hood tools for developers. OS 10.6 was considered to be the true reference release of OS X and a true successor is overdue.

Snow Leopard was also the last version of OS X that let you run PowerPC apps on Intel-based Macs courtesy of Rosetta. Lots of support for older Macs was removed. It was restricted to 64-bit Intel Macs, meaning the earliest supported Macs appeared in 2008. Quite restrictive indeed, but it made sense that Apple wanted to clean out past bloat, and move on.

Now there are clear reasons why some Mac users stuck with Snow Leopard. One is the fact that they were not interested in ditching those PowerPC apps. Another is that they just plain did not appreciate that Apple added some iOS-related interface niceties to OS X, although the changes were mostly minor.

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At a time where your cable or satellite bill may be north of $100, way north, the possibility of saving lots of money by cutting the cord may seem incredibly attractive. It does make sense in theory, but as a practical matter, it has its complications.

Unfortunately, stories about the process seldom bother to cover the gotchas. But I’ll make up for their lapses.

Let’s start from scratch. The theory goes that millennials don’t have the extra cash to buy a full-blown TV package, so they find ways to cut corners. So start with Netflix, add Hulu Plus, plus an antenna for local stations, and they have a decent TV package. Such streamers as Apple TV include those basic streaming channels and more, including sports and news, and the cable and satellite companies are wondering where the customers are going. Growth has stalled to a snail’s pace.

The existing cable/satellite providers have clearly priced themselves out of the market for many subscribers. When fees for content go up, they are passed on to you. Maybe you can re-up your subscription with a new one-year or two-year agreement and receive some temporary discounts, but they expire in a staggered fashion, and you may end up back where you started with a year left on that contract.

One of the problems is that they stick you with large and larger packages of channels. You cannot just order the 10 or 20 you really watch, because they might be stuck in different tiers. And I haven’t even started with premium channels, such as HBO and Showtime.

To get a piece of the cord-cutting action, Dish Network has brought into play Sling TV, a $20-a-month service consisting of a subset of channels that’s streamed online. You get a smattering of choices, including some sports, plus extra cost options — or tiers — if you’re not satisfied with the core collection. But not broadcast, at least not yet.

Sure, an antenna might suit, but what if you live a little bit too far from local stations to get decent reception. Indeed, that’s what brought about cable in the first place, where a company would set up a central antenna system (later buttressed with satellite dishes) to receive stations from far-away places and distribute them via a network of cables to customers.

In a CNET report, Dish’s Chief Executive Roger Lynch is quoted as saying that they plan to add broadcast networks “in a tier,” meaning as another extra cost option. But I think you can see where I’m going. Add a few tiers, and maybe a premium channel or two, and suddenly the monthly price isn’t altogether different from a standard cable/satellite package.

Add to that the elephant in the room, your broadband ISP’s bandwidth limits, and you can see where complications are in store.

Now wasn’t Sling TV supposed to be the cheaper alternative? What about a basic satellite package, where you don’t have to worry about Internet bandwidth? Dish’s America’s Top 120 costs $29.99 per month for the first year. All right, you have to pay $59.99 per month the second and subsequent years, but you get free HD and a free DVR. Consider that when you begin to add a few frills to Sling TV, the price difference will be far less. Bait and switch?

If you can live without the constant presence of the tube in your life, though, you’re apt to find a small number of services that aren’t expensive and offer what you need, or can live with. But things can quickly get out of hand if you start adding standalone services still believing that you’re somehow saving money over the traditional offerings.

So don’t get carried away.

Now I can see where the cable and satellite companies are coming from. Pushing slimmed down cloud-based packages, though, is just an alternative to so-called basic cable, and I fail to see how it serves the customer any better.

One way to better serve customers on a budget would be to offer a la carte programming. Choose one from Column A, two from Column C, and build a custom package that meets your needs, and only pay for what you want to watch. However, this sort of unbundling scheme should be priced in proportion to the stations you want, compared to the standard 100-400 channels they offer now. Unfortunately, existing content deals may include channels licensed to the cable/satellite systems as a bundle, which may complicate single channel offerings.

From a practical standpoint, a la carte may work fine for most of you. With the present structure of hundreds of choices, however, you may discover a new channel with great content simply by channel switching. But if that channel isn’t on your programming list, you’ll never see it, and that might work against the success of newer offerings in search of an audience. But throwing channels in different service levels, seemingly at random, doesn’t help either. You may have to order higher-priced tiers just to get a particular channel. DirecTV does that, for example, with Cloo, a channel that runs mostly repeats of popular crime procedurals. You can’t get it with the basic package.

As I write this, there are still those rumors that Apple is close to starting their own TV subscription service. The question is how Apple can make a difference and stand out from among the cable/satellite and free-standing channel clutter. How can they get you a decent selection of content at a lower price, without pushing you past your ISP’s bandwidth cap?

Unfortunately that raises questions that are seldom covered by the press.