Tbh I don’t know if they would cost 3x as much without ads. The hardware is kinda shit. It’s slow are barely working.

Start with limited ads on a free or cheap service, then open things up to a monetization team milk it.

Yeah that is probably they plan all along to lock us in and then enshitify it as time go on but even if they sell them at loss, we consume a lot of YouTube (I even rent movies from Google). They can make their money without ads, if they actually cared about having a great product and not just milk us.