> How’s the ink jet printer industry doing these days?
There's good competition from cheap laser printers.
> If everyone does it the only fix is a law.
What makes you think so? You could first try opening up the market more. You can lower barriers to market entry. Eg for new upstarts, for established companies in other industries trying to branch out, and for foreign would-be rivals, too.
It doesn't work that way anymore and people need to understand the old rules are gone. We've passed an inflection point where a few companies have dipped their toes into extreme enshittification or excessive price increases and survived, so we're seeing the start of a free for all. Think of Reddit and Twitter doing user hostile shit starting last year, and fast food raising prices beyond the point where it's a discount relative to better food anymore.
A critical mass of consumers is now so passive and docile that they don't change behavior as they're boiled alive.
> fast food raising prices beyond the point where it’s a discount relative to better food anymore.
Fast food has usually been more expensive than (not just “not at a discount to”) better food, ceteris paribus, because you are paying for “fast” in both money and quality.
It is less expensive than better food that also has higher grades of service when the demand for service at the level at issue is sufficiently great compared to the demand for speed.
I don't think you pay for fast. You may need fast so you settle for worse, cheaper food. But you sacrifice a better, slower dining experience. I'd consider that its own qualitative tradeoff separate from pricing.
But even if my framing is wrong, the fact remains that fast food has traditionally been cheaper than better (restaurant) food and only recently has that discount started to go away.
> Fast food raising prices beyond the point where it's a discount relative to better food anymore. A critical mass of consumers is now so passive and docile that they don't change behavior as they're boiled alive.
Sad and self-correcting by self-eliminating consumers. But that will take time and smaller markets are a net negative for the survivors.
Edit: I'm a big fan of the Cooler Master GP27Q and GP27U. They both have eye-bleedingly gorgeous HDR and won't break the bank. You can get the Q for about $550 and the U for under $900; the difference is that the Q is 1440p and the U is 4K.
The only criticism I have at all with them is that the firmware is kinda fucky (you will be spending your first few days with it constantly messing with settings, I guarantee) and doing computer stuff can be aggravating with FALD active; for example, I can scroll through a reddit post and watch the background color change between white and various shades of gray as I scroll, depending on the density of the text. But this is a complete non-issue if you're buying it as a TV replacement, and even if you are using it as a regular computer monitor, you get used to it real fast (and you can always turn off FALD when you're not watching something).
But a 27" screen does not really cut it in a large or even medium living room. Moving closer is not that easy if you also want to have a couch. Even if you cut down on your viewing amenities, watching something with more than two people isn't going to be fun.
"Smart" computer monitors are starting to arrive, and soon will probably be the only mainstream option. It is just too easy to tell investors "we are not a commodity display manufacturer; we are an ad platform with X% YoY growth, our customers have desirable demographics, and our impressions are available in unique business, academic, and gaming contexts".
I’m a liberal, I live in North America, my cheap flights have ads, my cheap TVs has ads, my cheap coffee has ads. My cheap inkjet printer is too expensive.
I want everything for free or cheap, I’m surprised it sucks, I have no choice. I have no money because I pay too much taxes and my cheap house is too expensive.
There’s a whole world of non shitty products out there that you could buy if you weren’t cheap. Most of them are less expensive than the products you DO buy.
My barista trained in Italy, and doesn’t have a liberal arts degree. I pay less for cappuccino than a drip coffee in Starbucks it doesn’t have any ads on the cup.
Google, Tizen, and WebOS are the major TV players, with Roku also somewhere in the mix.
All three of these companies do some level of surveillance, and yet they, or another proprietary device, are often required to watch streaming services.
You can argue that streaming services are unnecessary, but that means both spending a lot of time and money on physical media, or simply missing out, as many shows are now only showing on streaming, and not broadcast anymore.
Apparently 55" monitors do exist, a quick search yields Dell and Samsung for $2~3K. I don't know about TVs, but similarly sized ones seem available for half or even quarter of that price.
I own a Bravia, it has all the usual bells and whistles but was made in Japan for the Japanese market. We've had it connected to the internet for the year since we bought it and haven't had any trouble with ads.