I’ll have to defer to your superior knowledge of cars, I guess. I’ve only seen one car in the last few years with a touchscreen. And I’ve been in cars dozens of times over that period. Perhaps they just haven’t been new enough models.
> Monitors of sizes suitable for watching something in a living room from a couch are vastly more expensive than even the highest-end "smart" TVs. And that's assuming you can even buy them; such monitors are intended for things like digital signage, meaning that businesses - not consumers - are the intended customer.
Funny how the size of monitor that is considered “suitable for a living room” has changed over the years.
I think what you’re saying is that we don’t have a free market because the products advertised to consumers are more narrowly tailored than they appear. I disagree. I think that consumers have more information available to them than ever before at any point in history. If they have strong preferences, then there is nothing stopping them from getting exactly what they want. If they just want a nice looking flat–panel TV, and don’t want to spend a lot of time researching TVs, then they don’t have to bother. We should not even want them to have to bother, in that case, because that wouldn’t satisfy their values.
The old adage “The Customer is Always Right” applies here, in its original meaning. Whatever product sells the best is by definition the one that is most fit for the market, and we can't complain that it’s ugly, or not as well–built as it ought to be, or that it’s not fit for our particular purposes. If it sold well, then it wasn’t ugly to the people who purchased it, it was built well enough for the people who purchased it, and it fit their purposes well enough that they spent their hard–earned cash on it. It’s no good looking down our noses at them; they just don’t have the same tastes or preferences at us.
Maybe there’s a hypothetical product that could have sold better than whatever is selling the best right now, but there are often good reasons why those aren’t available yet. iPhones, for example, sell well primarily because they are trendy and hip. There are plenty of Android phones that are just as good, or even better, but they don’t satisfy people’s need to be trendy and hip. Maybe once iPhones lose their cachet, then the Android phones with the best features and technology will sell better. Or maybe by then Symbian will turn the market on its ear and become the big new thing. Or maybe brain implants that give us telepathy will make phones obsolete.
I think the market _is_ free, in spite of trendy things like iPhones and smart TVs. Certainly in some areas, like architecture, the government puts its thumb on the scales pretty heavily and distorts the market. Houses and apartments can’t be too small, because that wouldn’t be good for the people living in them, and other paternalistic rules of that type do distort the market. They do make it less free, by artificially limiting the available choices ahead of time.