>This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism u

>This is all marketing/commoditization at work, of course, and I'm not negative long-term. I think it's more that the principles of competition in capitalism ultimately tend to lead to converging on one or a very few solutions. In some cases that's good. We want things that are cheap and highly abundant, especially in cases where it works for most the population. Having affordable groceries works very well (let's ignore recent trends of inflation). But I don't think we always want converged solutions, I think there are many cases where as a society we want a lot of diversity, we want a wide selection to choose from, we want that sort of natural redundancy with some variance that occurs. It both helps make life interesting when it comes to things like the arts and in some cases I think having real choice of selection (not the illusion of choice where there are 10 options that are basically identical for all practical purposes) is very useful. There are many cases when things dictated by the mass market aren't what I want/need. I still want an easily swappable battery in a flagship phone as a simple example and expandable memory in the form of SD slots but alas the market has spoken and I'm stuck with poor alternatives if I want those functions. Or on a more practical note, I'd love to select from various airlines, there's dozens and dozens of them but the fact is I often ride coach and they're all just as crappy and customer hostile as each other. It doesn't matter if you pay just a little more for a ticket, you're out of luck. The tendency for markets to converge on the same price points to remain competitive makes them also converge on the same or similar solutions and that tends to lead to a lack of choice. Maybe consumers need to be willing to not always pay the lowest price for everything but I argue the issue isn't just there, it's systematic because the average consumer is also the average person producing the consumables and the way in which they get resources to consume which dictate to some degree what choices they have and so on and so forth. We seem to just be continuously converging on optimal solutions that don't fit everyone and are slowly fitting a handful of people in power more than anything else.