> then the market would be ripe for someone to market a dumb fridge for a premium and undercut the greedy competitors. THAT'S capitalism
THAT'S fairy tale capitalism. Sometimes it works that way in real life, but it very, very frequently it does not.
As soon as cost of adding a screen to a refrigerator becomes less than the ad revenue that screen can generate, you'll be hard pressed to find a refrigerator without one. They'll just be careful to avoid making it so annoying at first that it alienates customers, then do a frog-boiling exercise to slowly increase consumer tolerance for annoyance. That's where the incentives are, and the industry will follow the incentives.
