This is true, it’s not an individual datapoint. When smartphones, like the iPhone, originally debuted carriers had a conniption fit because they couldn’t preload a ton of garbage apps to help subsidize the cost. Apple has been able to avoid this, but for your average smartphone this is absolutely how both the manufacturer and carrier are able to sell them so cheaply.
Every experience may not be as bad as the one the OP had, but it’s surely well within reality. Both carriers and handset manufacturers are glad to sell anything and everything about someone to make a quick buck. They’ve literally been doing it for 25+ years.
You need to think about the aggregate data. Whole trends can be seen in almost real-time.
Here’s a made up example, and it’s probably not even the best one. - Show Teckno-Detectives shows a “Cameo” of Grapple’s newest mixed-reality glasses. The data shows that 3.9 million additional people watched the episode. Investment firms who pay for the data notice and buy extra Grapple shares to cash in on the expected sales bump.
Yes, but to make it worthwhile you need a lot of data and the price scales linearly.
Let's say my phone gets $10 cheaper because of all this crap ware. If you have the aggregate of 1000 people that cost someone $10000. Is that really worth it? Is 100000 people worth $1000000? Is there some point at which the aggregate data becomes so valuable it overtakes the per-user cost?
That's what I mean - the marginal value of one person needs to be quite big for this whole thing to make sense.
