Amazon Kindle with ads on the lock screen is already offered as cheaper hardware than without ads.

Why would you need the wifi turned on on a Kindle? One should just buy that version and turn off the wifi, thus getting rid of the ads.

One of the nice parts of using a Kindle is that it syncs your page between all of your devices, so if I want to quickly open the app on my phone and read a few pages I'm right where I was when I was last on my Kindle. When I get back to my Kindle, it has the new location synced.

I read a lot of non-fiction. One nice feature that it has on WiFi is the ability to highlight a word or phrase and it will display a definition or a Wikipedia article/snippet right there on the device. Its an easy and fast way to get more information out of your readings, especially when I'm at the pub with only my Kindle.

Another strong reason why you probably need WiFi on a Kindle at least some of the time is because WiFi is the primary way it gets content. You can get a USB cable to load stuff on it, but chances are if you've bought a Kindle you bought it to use the Kindle store.

Also, I'm pretty sure it downloads a bunch of ads at once when it syncs, and then shows them over time. I've had it disconnected from WiFi for a few weeks before, and it still showed ads. So even if you only connected it for a few minutes to sync everything and then you disconnected until you wanted a new book from the Kindle store, you would still see ads.

"How long until hardware manufacturers include dedicated advertising displays in exchange for cheaper up-front hardware?"

1999: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/business/no-more-giveaway-...

You can run ad blockers on iOS now. Purify is a good one. They only cover Safari, not web views, but that's still a lot better than nothing.

Tip: if you have another browser, turn off JS in Safari. Use Safari until you really need JS, copy paste URL, Chrome, go to clipboard link, retry. It's laborious, but it beats getting bent over the knee by mobile ads.

Sounds like state-of-the-art pre-adblock technology.

Browsing with no-JS/JS browsers indeed is laborious nowadays. I use this approach out of habit on my desktop machine, but on my new laptop I just couldn't bring myself to copy this solution and installed an adblocker instead.

Or just keep Javascript on but install JS Blocker 5 and choose what scripts run. It quite amazed me how much sites try to fingerprint your browser, especially with canvas fingerprinting.

Then people could just physically cover up the extra screens.

Or unplug them