Tbh I don't know if they would cost 3x as much without ads. The hardware is kinda shit. It's slow are barely working.
Start with limited ads on a free or cheap service, then open things up to a monetization team milk it.
Yeah that is probably they plan all along to lock us in and then enshitify it as time go on but even if they sell them at loss, we consume a lot of YouTube (I even rent movies from Google). They can make their money without ads, if they actually cared about having a great product and not just milk us.
I understand putting ads on a free service like Google search or YouTube. But I bought this fucking Chromecast. I even suggested it to friends and family.
Another case that pisses me off is having bought a pixel watch at premium price and they want me to pay a monthly shitty Fitbit subscription to provide me with some trivial computations.
Same thing with their Google home screen. You pay a good price and you need a subscription to use the fucking sleep sensor that you paid for.
Another one is having a premium pixel pro and they still want me to buy a Google one subscription to get useless photos filters with Google photos.
I love that Android is open source (mainly) but fuck you Google you are an embarrassment to your former self.
Tbh I don't know if they would cost 3x as much without ads. The hardware is kinda shit. It's slow are barely working.
Yeah that is probably they plan all along to lock us in and then enshitify it as time go on but even if they sell them at loss, we consume a lot of YouTube (I even rent movies from Google). They can make their money without ads, if they actually cared about having a great product and not just milk us.