I recently bought a $250 Zojurishi rice cooker because I wanted quality, durability and no "trade offs" I am going to start buying more and more Japanese electronics if US and South Korean companies keep colluding with each other in inserting garbage.

Samsung is already preloading intelligence service software and "365 copilot" into their phones to trick old people into paying for a subscription to open a PDF (it sets itself as a default app).

At this point it's a war against the consumer.

And it's not just this, they are slowly phasing out consumer hardware (GPU price increase, RAM, non NVME SSDs, etc.) in an effort to make hardware ownership impossible thus creating a "Market" for the post bubble burst of AI where they will be renting out PC hardware (all these datacenters that they are building which will be useless).

This is US led and also conveniently both the US and South Korea are involved, as they shut down China (both GPUs and RAM manufacturers in China were blacklisted).

It's not a coincidence, I Imagine the threats of potential tariffs if they do not comply does not help with their "independent thinking".

Ironically, Apple stands apart from basically all of these trends. We will see if they profit or perish because of it.

Sony TVs are not much better, I had to do quite a bit of work to de-Google mine. This was years ago, I'm sure it's even worse now.