Probably a lot more subscription based stuff. People don’t flinch about spending $50-$100 on their phone subscription but email, which is equally important, people expect it to be free from places like Google.
I don’t want to be that person and bring up this argument which isn’t answering your question but does big tech need to be funded? There is great open source alternatives to most big tech which are either ran by volunteers or funded by donation. They would be so much better supported if big tech alternatives did not exist.
Big tech selling hardware would still be funded that way. Apple, Lenovo, etc etc would be similarly funded. Microsoft sells licenses to their operating system.
I would argue the world would be a much better place if big tech wasn’t funded and open source projects were king.
Yeah, subscriptions and donations would have to be more than what is now. But distributed and federated systems and not chasing profitability at corporations would go a long way to running systems. Lemmy for example can be an alternative to Reddit while running off of hobbyist and donarion run servers. Gmail probably costs a fortune but what about 100,000 small independent email servers taking its place? Email is already a federated system. And then there’s self hosting. I bought a second hand computer and run the equivalent of Google Photos for myself and others on it for very cheap. Putting all these together, and if these were the default and more supported, the infrastructure costs can be spread thin.