Consumers no longer own their devices. Companies decide which code runs on them, and of course they choose code that makes them money.
There really is no reason to couple two functions (displaying images, selecting and playing content) in a single device. It's an antipattern for resilient and serviceable systems.
Soon they'll be coming with their own 5G chips that phone home over cell networks - no wifi access required.
Or, like the Amazon Echoes, they'll form a mesh network with your neighbors TVs and other devices and then just use your neighbor's wifi to phone home.
It's coming. I'm buying Spectres and I suggest others do the same.
Lol, if this all gets too onerous, I will just stick with my plasmas and CRT displays.
I have a few of each, they are in great condition and will be collecting a few more.
OLED may prove compelling enough to get me interested, but nothing LCD will, except as computer display.
I got super lucky on the plasma. It is big, beautiful and not all that smart. Got two of them, one seeing very light use.
Those things said, chances are the display tech that performs on par with fast plasma and CRT will probably come with the worst of this "smart" code.
Fine. I am game. Lets play. I will probably win, but it will also probably be a pain in the ass too.
Maybe I will just get a third plasma...
The other thing which has happened as a result of all this is I personally do not bother with TV much. Just hate the ads. Too much, too frequent, too repetitive.
> Soon they'll be coming with their own 5G chips that phone home over cell networks - no wifi access required
This is something I never understood about the IOT bullcrap, even if something can connect to a mobile network, they'd still need the expense of a data subscription which render the whole thing pretty moot. It's not as if 5G providers were operating their network for free.
The device manufacturer will eat the cost of the 5G subscription, since it will likely be lower than the revenue generated from the harvested personal data.
It will be only tracking and surveillance data that the TV uploads to the mothership. It's not like they will let you stream YouTube, Netflix or Prime on their inbuilt 5G connection.
So the cost will be minimal and further reduced by the bulk volume that the manufacturer would purchase from the telco. Like how Amazon Kindle comes with a free 3G connection to download your books and upload your reading habits.
You're not answering the question, I'm not asking anything about streaming anything over 5G. I'm asking about the cost of IoT subscription, plus all the logistic to put in place in every country where a company intend to your product.
When we had satellite TV (more than a decade ago), one of the conditions was to keep the receiver plugged into the phone line. If it wasn't plugged in, there'd be a $5 surcharge on the bill that month.
I figured this was because they were collecting data on viewership habits. Each customer profile must have been worth $5 or more, based on the surcharge amount.
(The phone line was useful for other things too, like ordering PPV/on-demand/premium channels through the menus directly, as opposed to calling them in through a 1-800 number.)
I'd expect that a company the size of Samsung is able to negotiate data plans at least an order of magnitude cheaper than anything available to the average consumer.
Maybe not in the HN bubble, but certainly outside. Many people don't give a fuck if it's smart or dumb, they buy what the salesman in the store manage to sell them. "Smart" sounds... Smart, so easy sell.
Then this article is simply preaching to a choir here. Perhaps it should be posted somewhere where more common people frequent so that their minds may be blown a bit, if they actually manage to read the article that is.
If they were not user hostile it could be nice. For example if the device itself ran the streaming software, you could turn on your TV from that streaming service’s phone app.
Many TV already allow this, either via Chromecast or AirPlay. Personally I hate using my phone as a remote, but many TV supports it. Given that this doesn’t work without networking, the inclusion of these features, might be a trick to get people to allow teir TVs to get on a network.
For me one of the major down fall of smart TVs is that even with out the privacy invasion they all just SUCK. The interfaces are terrible, the hardware isn’t nearly fast enough, they just all feel slughish, you can’t expect software updates for more than a few years and you can’t be sure that you prefered streaming service is available if you not in a major market.
It’s actually a surprise that not one TV manufacturer has admitted that they aren’t in fact able to produce a quality smart TV.
Maybe it’s just me, but I use the AppleTV as the benchmark for what you need to deliver as a minimum. Anything less is a bad experience. Remember the AppleTV is still just a minor product for Apple, and companies who try to sell a similar, more integrated product, can’t do better? Why?
> Incredibly, Samsung even recommends that you run virus and malware checking on your TV regularly.
Given its constant ambient speech scanning, Samsung also recommends that you leave the room if you want to have a private conversation. This makes me very, very angry.
> If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.
That seems normal, not like persistent background recording.
At least for the time being it's still possible to keep TVs off the internet and bypass this garbage. I've got a 2020 Sony and have never seen an ad on it.
I'm expecting these days are numbered though; some combination of ethernet-over-HDMI, Amazon Sidewalk, built-in 5G antennas, or just straight up refusing to work without a network connection feels like it's just a couple years away.
Imagine a TV that must be connected to the internet at all times being hacked so that it only plays educational videos about the evils of Smart TV's 24/7.
There's a good Darknet Diaries podcast episode about Hacker Giraffe, a guy who hacked 50,000 open printers to tell the owners their devices were exposed.
Way, way, way back in the day there was a tool called Simba and a search engine that you could use to find tons of music, etc. that would open download links in the Simba app. Turns out, that was just an SMB client connecting to open Windows shares.
I cannot seem to find it now, but I read couple years back something about TV manufacturers considering embedding a cell and sim card SoC into these smart TV's for exactly this reason.
I bought a Sony smart TV about a year ago. I don't get ads per say, but there is a prominent area in the main menu where Sony wants to shill their services and that can't be turned off. Also, TV has to be restarted every week or two (it's android).
On the other hand, I love that I can easily cast screen from my laptop or photos from phone using built in chromecast.
I have a Sony too, and it’s a little too chatty for my liking.
I blocked port 53 unless it came from my own dns and added the below to my blocklist on a pihole.
It’s deeply imperfect but has blocked a lot of their crap. I had to whitelist one Netflix domain.
I recently bought a new TV and did a little searching for dumb TVs before buying. It’s really hard to find a dumb TV. I learned that you can in fact buy a commercial TV that is dumb which seems like a good option.
I ended up going with a smart enabled Samsung TV and have not enabled the TV to access wifi. It wants me to agree to terms and conditions whenever I pull up the main menu. I’ve learned to ignore it but it has asked at least once without good reason to access wifi.
Yeah those are the reasons I went with the smart TV kept offline. It’s a bummer that TVs now come with terms and conditions designed to monetize you and even though you own the thing you can’t control it.
This may be tinfoil-hat adjacent, but I have heard that the allure of advertising data is so high that TV manufacturers will program their software to connect to any open WiFi network in order to deliver their collected data.
By the way, your post is basically the article, except they mention Sceptre TVs, who specialize in making dumb tv panels.
So I advertised sceptre TVs here last year about this time. I’ve had one for a year now and I do not recommend it. The color recreation is garbage, lots of glare, poor upscaling, and basically it’s everything you would expect out of a $200 55” tv (or $380 75”, they are stupid cheap) . Also my TV has a line of dead pixels and sceptre seems to have forgotten about my RMA.
While I won’t replace it with an LG Cx series oled, I won’t be ashamed to pickup a hisense or Samsung when I eventually rage quit this trash
At some point, it becomes time to pass draconian laws against consumer-hostile practices like phoning home other than to perform the intended function of a product or forcing updates that change behaviour in adverse or unwanted ways.
I am reasonably sure that point is already behind us, but politicians are not exactly known for their tech savvy and timely regulation of tech industry.
What else is worth legislating? If it was in the manufacturer's short-sighted selfish interest, they'd do it. For everything else, there's customer action and legal action.
It's being done all the time, and it's exactly what legislation is for. Workers rights, consumer protection, EPA, outlawing child labor and slaves, etc.
Interesting report, thanks for sharing it. I think there are other significant dangers in this area beyond those it covers, but promoting a better approach to privacy and to security updates after purchase would at least be two significant steps in the right direction.
Don't know if they are widely available or available anymore but the last time I bought a TV, I got a commercial display for digital signage which had no smart tv features. It just had a bunch of HDMI/av inputs which I used with game consoles/android TV box. The screen is not as great as latest TVs for home use.
Could you just do a computer monitor? They have an HDMI port so they will show anything you want. Downsides: no tuner. Not a problem if you don’t need one. No remote control. Maybe not much of a downside if you’re just watching using a streaming box. No sound. Not a problem if using a sound bar.
Seems a worthy idea if you’re concerned about tracking, but I don’t see this idea around so I must be missing a downside.
If instead of a chair-desk-monitor you're sitting at a couch 5 times further from the screen, the equivalent screen size is 5 times larger, so 75" for the equivalent of what a 15" monitor gives you at your desk.
Meanwhile to sit somewhere where a 75" TV in my living room takes up a corresponding field of view to my 27" PC monitor I think I'd need to knock a few walls and sit in my neighbours
I am using a 65 inch dumb Samsung pc screen together with a Nvidia shield. 3 years ago I bought the screen for 1000 bucks.
Nvidia shield remote also works with the screen and stereo tuner.
For my it's the perfect setup.
Rooted the shield to get rid of all non essential crap. No ads. Very fast. And Plex,Kodi, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify working perfectly.
I picked up a 40” Sceptre “dumb tv” for $150 on Black Friday and added a Google TV Chromecast. The TV itself just does the bare minimum: turn on/off, sound higher/lower. Everything else is controlled by Google TV. By far my best purchase of the year.
I quite like our Google TV Chromecast too (I think that's the name, the new one with the remote). Our old Samsung from 2013 had a lot of issues, Netflix would stall a lot, and Disney Plus never even released an app for it.
Turns out it wasn't the WiFi like we suspected, the TV was apparently just poorly coded junk. It's smooth playing on the new device (apart from the time it crashed and needed a reboot). My only complaint is that it associated with my YouTube account but it's a shared TV, so the main screen has watching suggestions based on what I have personally watched and I cannot 'log out' of YouTube alone. This is annoying, but it's Google, so what is privacy? I guess I can make a new account.
Some people upgrade to a new TV as often as every two/three years. You just need to find them on gumtree just before christmas. Thats how I got my big dumb LG.
I’m really pleased the author called out the Apple TV as a device that lets you avoid ads. We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place.
There’s lots of griping about the cost of an Apple TV 4k, but I’ll pay that extra $100 to avoid ads and not be tracked so extensively.
Yep plus when you start to stretch the Fire Stick and a few other products you find a number of issues. For example I've spend probably in the region of 40 hours trying to fix issues with Firestick and Echo Studio. When they work well they are excellent value for money products. But then you get a glitch (like audio dropping because of a lack of sync) and it becomes a morass. Hours upon hours and no solution (eventually getting to, we need to send this to our Devs). Apple stuff just works. Not as cheap and maybe not as hackable in some ways but it just works.
I never had a single issue with my roommates' Samsung smart TV (casting or otherwise) besides some buggy apps. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on "just works."
That is a bad alternative, as in no alternative at all really. I don't want a device that requires me to do network engineering to prevent it from doing things I didn't ask for or want.
Bought a Samsung TV that purports to support Airplay. It works... except for some apps can’t stream to it. Turns out that some apps can only Airplay to official Apple devices and not the Samsung TVs despite marketing. I was planning to neuter the network from my TV and go with an Apple TV anyways, but that sealed the deal.
My parents have a Samsung TV and it’s incredibly slow to the point it’s difficult to change the volume. I think they pushed out OS updates that made it slower.
Somehow, google has made it so that the best way to watch YouTube on an Apple TV is to open YouTube.com in a browser on another apple device and airplay to the Apple TV.
I like the apple tv interface, but I really disliked the remote that ships with it. The touchpad like interface feels really awkward, i would lift it up the wrong way pretty much every time. I remember reading about an apple certified 3rd party remote that was more like a traditional tv remote but that was only sold in the european market for some reason. If they ever decide to switch back to a proper remote i'll take a look at apple tv again. I'll keep running a roku til that happens.
Not a huge fan of the Apple TV remote either (But I also don't hate it). The good news is that the Apple TV plays nice with stock TV remotes + game console controllers — I use my 8bitdo Sn30 Pro, but PS/Xbox controllers should work fine too.
If you already own an extra gamepad, then it's worth a try and doesn't cost extra. There's a few gems in Apple Arcade, which was a surprise.
> Not a huge fan of the Apple TV remote either (But I also don't hate it). The good news is that the Apple TV plays nice with stock TV remotes + game console controllers — I use my 8bitdo Sn30 Pro, but PS/Xbox controllers should work fine too.
Thanks, this is nice to know! I'll keep this in mind for whenever I'm ready to replace my Roku.
I didn’t like it at first, but now it’s my favorite tvbox remote ever.
Mainly because it doesn’t take batteries, is flat, works great with my phone, and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.
I do pick it up the wrong way a lot, but it’s better than all other devices I’ve tried- fire, roku, tv, wd.
Just not having to find doubleA batteries in the past few months has made me accept it.
The built in batteries are indeed nice and I did like that aspect of the remote.
> and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.
Interesting! This goes to show how the same design feels so different to different users :)
I think I could've gotten used to the touchpad if I spent a lot more time with with the apple-tv/remote, but at the time it felt like a big regression. Compared to the roku remote, i'd lose a mute button, a headphone jack for private listening, and ended up with a touch heavy interface that was more frustrating than useful considering me and wife would pick it up the wrong way a lot. At the end of the day I decided to stick with a Roku and have something that doesn't frustrate my wife, instead of trying to get used to the remote just to have the apple tv interface :)
I bought a silicon sleeve[0] for my remote - it makes it much easier to find in the dark, and it makes it really obvious which way is the right way to grab and use it.
I generally use the built in remote app on my iPhone though - it’s accessible from control center, and my phone is usually easier to find than the remote at any given moment.
I initially preferred the old, aluminium Apple TV remote when I first got the new one. But now, especially with kids I really appreciate the new one.
- My four year old can search for shows by asking Siri instead of needing to type
- When we're all watching together you can slide your finger over the touch surface to make one of the icons wobble in 3D. It's great when you're asking which episode someone would like to watch, you can highlight and focus the UI for them
- No batteries and charges by lightning. I never had those R2032 batteries for the Aluminium remote whenever it ran out
Agreed on lifting it up the wrong way every time. I bought a few cheap silicon covers for mine in bright colours and it really helps
I had gotten used to my Apple TV remote. Sure, it kinda sucked not being able to instantly orient it but I kind-of got used to that too. Sure, it kinda sucked when I would accidentally brush my finger against the trackpad and do something unintended but I kind-of got used to that too.
But it being made out of glass. What where they thinking?! You know how I orient the Apple TV remote now? My fingers know where the broken glass is on it. Making that out of glass was so beyond a dumb idea that I can't begin to imagine what they were thinking.
The end result is, I love the Apple TV, but I don't know that I'll ever buy another one if the remote continues to be made of glass.
Yes - I wish Apple would just make a TV. Call it a living room screen or a living room monitor or something.
Make it OLED, dumb TV, instant on, Apple TV box plugs in. Separate box with front facing ports that connects to screen with one cable. A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?).
This entire market is in desperate need of someone to make something decent.
The best available option today is LG and it’s still laden with ads and takes a few seconds to boot up.
> A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds
I love that a sibling comment to yours calls out the remote as dealbreaker terrible, but I agree with the sentiment that I would love a remote that was really well-designed.
You can go too far in the other direction too, however. Apple TV remote infamously has no mute functionality. And if you do an internet search on how to mute the Apple TV using the remote (because of course there’s a way, right? No one would design a TV remote that has volume control without mute) you get either one of two answers:
- it’s impossible/difficult to do with current tech (not true)
- the classic Apple forum response of “why would you want to do that?”
This turned into a bit of a rant but I’ll conclude the thought by saying that there’s certainly some sort of happy medium between a gajillion buttons on the remote and lack of absolutely critical functionality. In fact if you invest a bit of extra money into the Sideclick add-on to Apple TV remote you achieve exactly that.
I put some gaffer tape on the bottom of my Apple TV remote to make it obvious which end is up. I'm personally not a fan of the touchpad. In principle, it's a decent solution to the problem, but Apple's implementation is somehow not sensitive enough and too sensitive at the same time.
I bought some silicon sleeves that fix this issue (the bottom half of the remote face with no buttons is covered by silicon). It also resolve the issue that the remote is very slippery in your hands as well as the issue of being unable to tell which remote goes where if you have multiple Apple TV’s (you can get different color silicon for each TV).
I had to look up a picture because I didn't realize they'd updated the remote at some point. I apparently have a previous generation remote which has all the controls at one end and is pretty usable in the dark. It's sad (but not shocking) to see design usability regress like that.
New versions of the new design have a raised white circle around the menu button which makes it obvious which side is the top (if you couldn’t tell from feeling the trackpad).
People on HN complain about this a lot, but I’ve used it for years and had parents use it without issue. I think it’s a made up problem.
I’d probably do something that’s a large dial like an Apple Watch crown for volume that takes up most of a square remote and you push down for mute/unmute.
The other buttons I’d have on it would be power, and input switch.
I’d have an Apple HomePod sound bar which connects to the tv so you don’t have to configure any of that.
Then you’d use the Apple TV remote like normal for everything else. The regular dial remote is just always sitting on the coffee table.
Alternatively they could extend the existing Apple TV remote a bit to add a mute and volume knob or reconfigure to be the one remote for the dumb tv and the Apple TV.
Much as their adware laden TVs drive me crazy, I have to admit that their remote is absolutely amazing. A nice piece of aluminum with a minimum number of buttons, and yet you can control Netflix, Prime, TV etc
Amazon FireTV remote is pretty good, latest gen added a volume control inc. mute button (so you don't need your TV remote). Source switching uses CEC over HDMI. You don't need to point the controller for most tasks as it's Bluetooth. If I had a TV that used CEC I wouldn't need the original remote at all.
You'd prefer it until you try using it. When you want to reduce the volume the last thing you need to do is go looking for the app. Now a watch app, that's something.
On iPhone, there is a built in remote app in control center, then you use the volume buttons on the phone to adjust the TV volume. It’s part of the OS, not the remote app from the App Store, and I’ve found it to be a good fit for those emergency volume adjustments. Sharing so others can benefit from what took me a while to discover :)
I got into a very similar conversation with Chase's robo call the other day. Went like this:
C: bla bla bla, if you want to speak to a representative say "representative".
Me: representative
C: sorry i couldn't understand, please chose an option or say representative to speak with one
Me: re-pre-sen-ta-tive
C: (same answer as before)
Me: REPRESENTATIVE
C: (same answer as before)
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF
C: Ok, I'll call a representative
I want to believe that their system either sensed the tension in my voice or saw the expletive and decided to call for adult supervision.
I'm not an native English speaker so I have an accent (which isn't too heavy, but still). Using any form of speech recognition is an instant fuck-show.
My HTC One M8 back in the day shipped with a universal remote app that used the built-in IR blaster and it was fantastic. HTC's subsequent discontinuation of that app (and its replacement with a third-party app that was basically useless) is what immediately drove me to never want to buy an HTC product again.
I had that phone too and I vaguely recall that wasn't HTC's decision to cripple the IR but rather the result of HTC infringing someone else's (because naturally someone would have a patent about something as obvious as using a smart phone as an IR remote....)
The AppleTV lets you use your iPhone as a remote. I always reach for the physical remote first. The phone remote is just a huge pain — the physical remote just works.
> A company can disappear along with its stupid fucking app.
Absolutely true, which makes a good argument also for going back to websites and pages (HTML5 helps a lot) instead of the apps business model that basically brought us back to the pre-www era.
Also regarding the phone (mis)use as remote, why nobody mentions latency? Every smartphone I tried had an absolutely atrocious UI latency even compared to my 30 years old Amiga 500, why should I want to use it instead of a dedicated device that does the job immediately and I can substitute with 5€, and sometimes even repair?
Physical remotes are better, particularly if your hands are dirty (like during eating). A physical remote can be used easily without looking at it and it can be cleaned later easily too. Though it's also true that a lot of remotes are difficult to handle.
What we need might actually be a single remote for everything.
I'd argue the opposite: in my experience, a uniform glass surface is a lot easier to clean (and avoid getting dirty in the first place) than some bumpy surface with crevices into which crumbs inevitably sneak in.
Re: a single remote for everything, the term for that is "universal remote", and not once have I been satisfied with one due to the difficulty and fragility of programming it. Maybe in this day and age we can finally make that programming dead simple and robust; Logitech came close with its universal remote from years ago, but even that still wasn't quite easy enough to setup and use to fully replace all my remotes. That HDMI-CEC or whatever it's called also comes close, but it's restricted to HDMI, obviously leaving non-HDMI devices in the dust.
A lot of the responses disagree. I generally prefer physical remotes, but a touchscreen remote could be pretty sweet for very complex systems (think whole-room/whole-house systems that integrate A/V with lighting, HVAC, etc.) if implemented well. But the whole interaction model with phones and apps is just... wrong for this usecase. The delays, the many swipes and taps just to get to the right screen, the delays, waiting for the app to load and connect to the network, and also the delays.
I've been meaning to hack an old phone to be an instant-on remote with some custom software, but there are always dozens of higher priority projects. If anyone wants to hire/partner with me to build such a thing though...
But have you even seen an app that remained paired to any piece of hardware whatsoever for more than a few minutes?
Using any form of technology? Without dropping one side or the other into an irreparable state that requires power cycling one or both ends at least once and then hoping for the best?
It’d be cool if it worked, by my expectation is that it’ll be implemented by the guy in charge of that YouTube “cast” app that has only theoretically worked one time in a lab in Palo Alto.
I had an app on my Palm Pilot for that, it was really reliable but it was annoying to light up if I was watching something in the dark. One nice thing was that the (rechargeable) battery was always charged up, unlike the physical remote which seemed to be dead more often than it should have been.
Presumably will still boot slowly and only the topmost UI layer loads differently, and until they confirm otherwise I’m guessing that even with a simplified UI it still includes all the creepy tracking of everything you watch.
How will they track you though, some sort of real time content id of everything you watch? Is there any evidence that they do this? If it’s in dumb tv mode and the display stream is coming from a separate device like an Apple TV then it seems much less trivial to track you than if you’re using the builtin smart features.
Yes, they’re basically all doing this. “Automatic Content Recognition,” called various things by the different brands, lets them know what you’re watching even if it’s coming from another device over HDMI instead of using the TV’s apps.
Evidence is a high bar. But I can tell you my f...ing smart tv asks me on behalf of tv stations to accept cookies when I switch to some german tv stations. Yes, I'd say they are tracking what I am watching. That is with TV over satellite in Germany.
As much as I want this to happen. And I have been advocating for it [1] for many years. The more I read into the whole TV, display panel and electronic industry the grimmer it is for such Apple TV set to exist.
An Apple branded TV, even if it is without the TV part or just a monitor would have to be at least 2-3x the price of today's similar TV sets. And if anything OP were only willing to paid an extra $100 is probably why Apple didn't make one.
Some of the TV in the industry isn't just on Low Margin. They are entering negative margin territory if you are discounting Data Selling and software / partner sponsorship.
Unless the cost electronic part continue to raise to the point where Apple has an advantage with their SoC.
I think one of their original purpose or intention for ProXDR was the use the Dual Layer LCD technology to create something like a true Reference Display Monitor. But the technology and cost never got to that point. At least I hope they could continue their investment in that area even if they do not intend it to be in consumer usage.
Why would it be 2 or 3 times more? Apple phones are between 10 and 15 times the price of the cheapest Android alternatives (iPhone 12 $999 from Apple, Samsung Galaxy A01 $55 from Amazon). Apple could, and probably would, sell a $4000 television.
The $300 TV that you found probably has poor audio, viewing angle, contrast ratio, support, etc. From the limited research I did before buying my TV, a 55" TV with good reviews for panel and sound quality that you can rely on for 5-10 years costs C$1,200 today.
Good sound probably requires a sound bar. I'm not sure the physics of flat panel TVs allows for great sound quality. Getting a sound bar went from me mostly using my wall mounted TV as a digital picture frame (which was my primary thinking when I bought it) to actually being the TV I use for streaming most of the time.
5-10 years? I know I'm not on the latest technology step. But 4K isn't worth me upgrading perfectly functional TVs. Maybe if we get to reasonably priced OLED panels but I'm not in a big hurry to upgrade TVs that are working.
I disagree, 4K HDR even on LCD panels is worth the picture. And a major jump from 1080p. Though what I agree with you about is the OLED prices. Been ages and still no indication of the prices climbing down.
You can get a 55” TCL QLED 4K TV for around $500 - Amazon currently has them for $534, I paid $460 a few months back. All the specs are amazing, as is the software - minimal, intuitive, and effective. And the sound is actually rather impressive out of the box, but if you want any low frequencies you need bigger external speakers that cannot physically fit in a flatscreen TV.
I actually took home quite a few (3-4) more expensive TVs from Costco before buying the TCL, and it was far and away the best set while also being 1/2 to 1/3 the price.
I'd say 1500 dollar TV is a viable purchase given that a TV has a life of 15+ years as against to 1000 dollar iphone or any other mobile which actually has a life of may be 4-5 years.
It would be the best of Apple product to show off.
All OLED TV, including non LG OLED currently ships about 5M unit per year. The volume of those high price range OLED are tiny in total shipping volume.
And if that specific LG model charges 3 to 5K, Apple will have to sell it at 6 to 10K.
There is only one OLED TV display panel maker. That is LG.
Edit: I think I need to spell things out a little more clearly. If Apple were to use OLED and aim at a top tier market, then it would be competing directly with LG TV, which also happens to be gaining momentum in terms of both OLED display panel ( LG Display ) and TV set ( LG Electronics ). LG Display will also need to built new Fab for Apple. The recent expansion at Guangzhou doubling their capacity, AFAIK has already been booked and has no relation to Apple. i.e LG has little interest to do it with Apple given they are already fully booked on capacity. And Apple doesn't seems to be interested in pushing LG to partner.
The answer to if Apple could do something will always going to be yes given they have hundreds of billions of cash and has little idea what to do with it other than buying back stocks.
The answer to if Apple will do it is always going to complex. And nothing in the supply chain and BOM cost analysis suggest it is a good strategy worth going for.
The best option that I know of today (in terms of resulting usabilty and long term reliability) is using a dumb computer monitor and roll the rest yourself with a Raspi.
While this option is certainly not available to all, it is the only thing that will really fit your needs. I completely gave up on finding anything decent in that market.
This comment is a part of why TV sucks so hard - ridiculous users.
Everyone's idea of 'simple' is rather asinine, unimaginative.
The latest Pis come practically preinstalled with everything, just have to load Kodi.
But someone who has found 'their' solution i.e. some crap by Apple e.g. assumes this is how everything should be... And we all get stuck with crappy 'smart' TVs (or don't own one - I have survived 10+ years without a TV - absolutely nothing about TVs today makes me want one. So much hot garbage)
In my experience getting Kodi set up is a massive time sink, to the point that the programmer time needed to set it up would easily double the total cost of a typical home theater setup. Admittedly my experience with it is a few years out of date, but a quick search for incredibly basic functionality like running the big streaming services makes it clear that this hasn’t really changed. On top of most of them being limited to 720p, it looks like the canonical solution nowadays is to run them in Chrome from Kodi, which (1) phones home to Google, unlike an Apple TV and (2) necessitates a mouse or other pointing device since you can’t rely on “keyboard” navigation with a remote - this alone would be a dealbreaker for me.
The best for me obviously. I was the one who made the comment and declaring an object "the best" of any category is always a subjective statement.
My own solution has the pros:
- I control precisely what I need and what not, both in terms of features and in terms of usability
- I control when it gets changed/updated
- I control which data flows in and out of the system
- Your device is not a brick when the manufacturer decides to end the support or shuts down the wrong server
The obvious downside is that it means work and requires a certain set of skills. Whether it is worth it or not depends on how important that thing is for you and how much all the TVs suck at doing what you want in the way you want it done.
To be fair tvs are a very low margin product and without the ads it would be profitless for anyone but apple (or another manufacturer that sold as a premium to avoid ads). I don't know how big the market for that is, personally I'm happy with a dumb tv connected to a video game console that has all my streaming services.
i can't help but think it is like bundleware and the PC, which would subsidize the cost of the system, maybe by $50.
same thing is happening with TVs. This crap subsidizes the price of the TV, so then the $279 tv looks more attractive than the more expensive tvs without ads/tracking/data gathering (which then disappear)
TVs used to much more expensive, and they only became cheap when TV manufacturers realized there’s a ton of money to be made by selling your personal information. A manufacturer that doesn’t do this would not be competitively priced I’m afraid.
I don’t agree with this video. I bought a 55” plasma for $800 over 10 years ago. And I bought a Sony Triniton for $1000 around 2000. The price of TVs seems to be fixed around this price point and we seem to get more features, bigger screens, etc and the price stays about the same.
The highest end TVs I see also have ads. So I don’t think this factors into the price at all. It’s just bonus profits on top of existing profits.
If ad data subsidized prices significantly, I wouldn’t expect it in $4,000 TVs. Am I supposed to believe that the TV would be $4,050 without ads? It seems strange that high end TVs would care about these small amounts.
I think this is just a cover story by marketers to garner sympathy.
At the rate things are going you're likely going to want to just blackhole all of the public DNS-over-https providers[0] to ensure that it's not switching to DoH to get around your rules.
The non-Apple equivalent is the Nvidia Shield TV. Excellent piece of hardware that gives you access to basically every streaming app, plus integrates with Android's casting setup.
Also fun fact, the Shield TV is the longest supported Android device in existence
You know you are tracked, right? It's just all the tracking information goes to one big monopolist instead of multiple providers. This may make it feel as if there is less tracking going on but it really isn't.
I agree that you are still being tracked on an Apple TV, but that's because the YouTube app is still made by Google, and the Netflix app is made by Netflix, etc.
Apple probably has some sort of tracking system, but they're hardly a tracking monopolist, not even on their own devices.
> We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place.
If we're talking about the original, non-4k Fire TV Stick, then yes. The 4k version is speedy, but still laden with ads.
I recently purchased a Roku Streaming Stick Plus ($39 USD on Amazon — that's ~20% the price of an Apple TV) because I found out that they natively supported AirPlay 2. If you're looking for an ad-free experience, VPN out to an unsupported country and create a Roku account there. You'll be able to add less "channels", but Roku also stops trying to hard-sell you on subscriptions.
Will we eventually arrive at a product spectrum, where customers can have the desired level of network integration for cel phone, camera, car, television, software, etc?
We use the same word for governance as we do for data: the state.
Having a hardcopy DVD, a dump player, and a dumb TV allows you to partake of the state you own without the State (or its BigTech owners) hassling you.
Last time this topic came up, I asked about the idea of a company producing dumb TV. I know a number of “normal” people who don’t particularly care for internet connectivity in anything so I was curious why no one was doing it, at least not with the sizes and resolutions you see on top of the line TVs.
Apparently the margins on commodity hardware like TVs are too small. Someone did bring up and interesting idea of running a batch released product based on something like a Kickstarter though.
It looks like since I last checked the "smart" is creeping in, but these are designed to "accept input, and display it" so it's as close as we can get without custom manufacturing.
These kinds of displays are not really calibrated to present television and cinema video content. Watching long-form visual media on these kinds of displays could be a frustrating experience - at least, these have been my prior results.
though if you just compare specs and ad-copy, you can just get a one designed for indoors and control room applications. Which behaves like a typical TV priced around 20-30% below. At least this seems true for the samsung lineup, which roughly looked like "cheapest option (for sure not worse than their awful 350$ TVs) < 24/7, medium brightness (got that and it's super nice in a bright living room, also non "calibration" issues ) < high end, QLED" - this mirrors their "normal" lineup very closely and I think economies of scale dictate that they won't use custom panels (as indicated by their yearly update of this bland, simple to understand lineup) so I guess these won't be any worse than what you get in a TV. Backlights are obviously not tuned for super-highend-HDR, but I don't think people here complaining about ads are in the market for that and full sRGB is pretty ok on a device which just works (no banding, no ads, no "image-improvement" algos in the background).
Do you inspect all traffic going through ? I'll NEVER trust my TV to be "connected", I basically use all my "TV" as monitors for a raspi or chromecast.
It was on the long list of product categories we explored from a distance for our roadmap. It's not a category we're going to enter any time soon, but we did at least get a blog post out of it!
In addition to not having the ecosystem network effects from modules and upgrades that notebooks (our first category) have, TVs are extremely difficult logistically. You need to be able to get really great financing terms and freight rates to be able to have huge thousand dollar objects sitting on boats, trains, and trucks for weeks at a time.
Roku TVs have had this from the start. When you first setup (or factory reset) the TV, you can choose to not connect it to a network. In that state, neither WiFi or Ethernet are routable, so no data leaves the TV. The TV does broadcast a private WifI network used for pairing RF remotes. Roku releases USB updates for the TVs periodically, usually a little while after a major release has been released over the network to all units, but those updates usually aren't needed for unconnected use unless there's some issue with OTA reception or HDMI that were found in the field.
I recently bought a new "LG UN7300 UHD 43" Smart 4K TV with AI ThinQ". I will never connect it to WiFi as it is plugged into my media PC. I'm hoping this will have some benefit to the resale value when mainstream realise the benefits of Smart TV's that have not been 'tainted' by firmware updates.
That’s weird how Vizio TVs haven’t dropped in price once ads started “subsidizing” their prices.
I think he means that without ads they wouldn’t make as much so they would have to charge more to make the same amount of money they would with ads (which is the same they used to make).
The best thing about smart TV's is they are cheaper than otherwise and you can dumb them by not connecting them to wifi/internet. Just add in your own NUC running linux and you have the best of both worlds. Get a logitech mx ergo as the "remote control" and you're good to go.
They're still taking extra time to boot up an OS and using electricity to track what you're doing. There have also been stories on HN about smart TVs connecting to open wifi to send data home.
Yeah, I used to buy TVs and use them as bigger, cheaper monitors. Now it seems like I need to do the opposite... too bad it probably costs a hefty chunk of change to get a giant monitor!
> like breaking up the traditional channel bundle and increasing access to more personalized and niche content.
Yea this is benefit decreases every day. The "cord-cutting" phenomenon is dead. Want to watch a discovery show? Oh great, it's only on Discovery plus now, $5 a month. Want to watch Premier League soccer? Peacock Premium! Cobra Kai? Netflix... marvel? Disney+. Oh but you can't watch THIS nfl game on here because it's blacked out locally for TV. Champions League soccer? Sign up for CBS All Access. Can't forget HBO Max!
When you add everything up, cable for me was actually cheaper. But now I'm screwed, because they aren't putting shows on TV channels anymore to get people to sub to their streaming service.
If a service has something I want to watch, i sign up for it and immediately cancel it. My state has a law that any subscription that allows signups online has to allow cancellations online, so this is convenient.
While I let my smart TV connect to the internet for firmware update reasons (bug fixes), I’m running my entire home network through NextDNS, and before that a PiHole. Not seeing any ads in the UI, and I note some attempted logging traffic is blocked.
Before I upgraded to LG last year I had a Samsung and it was trying to ping home constantly. It constituted 80% of outbound requests denied by the PiHole
You can work around this by either setting a fake gateway in a static IP configuration, or configuring your DHCP server to give a fake gateway to requests coming from the TV's MAC address.
By "fake gateway" I mean a non-existing IP on your LAN: that way, no outgoing request from the offending MAC address will ever get out to the public Internet.
It's already mentioned in this thread: built in IoT. There are IoT vendors that have roaming agreements worldwide; typically you stick these things on containers or other mobile assets. They call home whenever they can.
For an actual arms race, we need vendors on the consumer side front to create beautiful Faraday Cages for "your" home appliances.
I have a similar setup at home: local AdGuardHome deployment with NextDNS as the upstream. I have several NextDNS configurations and AdGuardHome's upstream is one that has no filters. I use other profiles with filters when I am on the go.
I can't install NextDNS client on a lot of devices like a robot vacuum. Sure you can configure NextDNS to be the resolver on the gateway, but then the gateway becomes the only client in your NextDNS logs and you can't figure out which device is downloading Google ads, which makes the log useless. It is also easier to temporarily disable filters -- changing DNS on some routers may need a rebooting, which causes downtime on the whole home network.
The only thing you can do with NextDNS logs is looking at them on NextDNS web UI. I had a lot of fun messing with my local AdGuardHome logs with visualizations, analysis, and alerting.
I upgraded my TV to a Sony X950 because I cannot find a decent dumb TV, got really annoyed with the super buggy Google Android TV thing.
The cold start time is absurdly high, the basic feature of a TV - built in OTA TV player has a bug that the channel display stays on forever, the Airplay frequently play video with no sound. The only fix is find the 3 level deep restart menu item, because power on / off doesn’t matter.
I would be more than happy to pay more for a normal Sony TV, with a “not using Google Android TV” label.
I also bought one recently. The most annoying issue for me is that it automatically changes the setting for my audio output and there is no way to tell it to just respect my damn setting and stop doing auto changes.
389 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadThere really is no reason to couple two functions (displaying images, selecting and playing content) in a single device. It's an antipattern for resilient and serviceable systems.
Then they are just dumb HDMI panels.
Or, like the Amazon Echoes, they'll form a mesh network with your neighbors TVs and other devices and then just use your neighbor's wifi to phone home.
It's coming. I'm buying Spectres and I suggest others do the same.
I don't have any active cell phone modems on my property ever, so such transmissions would be easy to identify.
I have a few of each, they are in great condition and will be collecting a few more.
OLED may prove compelling enough to get me interested, but nothing LCD will, except as computer display.
I got super lucky on the plasma. It is big, beautiful and not all that smart. Got two of them, one seeing very light use.
Those things said, chances are the display tech that performs on par with fast plasma and CRT will probably come with the worst of this "smart" code.
Fine. I am game. Lets play. I will probably win, but it will also probably be a pain in the ass too.
Maybe I will just get a third plasma...
The other thing which has happened as a result of all this is I personally do not bother with TV much. Just hate the ads. Too much, too frequent, too repetitive.
I have never been happier. All that bonus time!
This is something I never understood about the IOT bullcrap, even if something can connect to a mobile network, they'd still need the expense of a data subscription which render the whole thing pretty moot. It's not as if 5G providers were operating their network for free.
So the cost will be minimal and further reduced by the bulk volume that the manufacturer would purchase from the telco. Like how Amazon Kindle comes with a free 3G connection to download your books and upload your reading habits.
I figured this was because they were collecting data on viewership habits. Each customer profile must have been worth $5 or more, based on the surcharge amount.
(The phone line was useful for other things too, like ordering PPV/on-demand/premium channels through the menus directly, as opposed to calling them in through a 1-800 number.)
That was what HDMI CEC was supposed to deliver... assuming that it works. Hit and miss.
For me one of the major down fall of smart TVs is that even with out the privacy invasion they all just SUCK. The interfaces are terrible, the hardware isn’t nearly fast enough, they just all feel slughish, you can’t expect software updates for more than a few years and you can’t be sure that you prefered streaming service is available if you not in a major market.
It’s actually a surprise that not one TV manufacturer has admitted that they aren’t in fact able to produce a quality smart TV.
Maybe it’s just me, but I use the AppleTV as the benchmark for what you need to deliver as a minimum. Anything less is a bad experience. Remember the AppleTV is still just a minor product for Apple, and companies who try to sell a similar, more integrated product, can’t do better? Why?
Given its constant ambient speech scanning, Samsung also recommends that you leave the room if you want to have a private conversation. This makes me very, very angry.
That seems normal, not like persistent background recording.
I'm expecting these days are numbered though; some combination of ethernet-over-HDMI, Amazon Sidewalk, built-in 5G antennas, or just straight up refusing to work without a network connection feels like it's just a couple years away.
Tesla cars now.
On the other hand, I love that I can easily cast screen from my laptop or photos from phone using built in chromecast.
Smart TVs are a mixed bag.
https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...
Edit: I just checked. The Sony TV made 8249 requests in the last 24 hours. I have more locking down to do.
I ended up going with a smart enabled Samsung TV and have not enabled the TV to access wifi. It wants me to agree to terms and conditions whenever I pull up the main menu. I’ve learned to ignore it but it has asked at least once without good reason to access wifi.
1) The remaining consumer options are on the low to mediocre end of the spectrum and don't have great picture
2) The commercial options are more expensive with mediocre picture, as they're intended for digital signage (24/7 full brightness), not movies.
By the way, your post is basically the article, except they mention Sceptre TVs, who specialize in making dumb tv panels.
While I won’t replace it with an LG Cx series oled, I won’t be ashamed to pickup a hisense or Samsung when I eventually rage quit this trash
I am reasonably sure that point is already behind us, but politicians are not exactly known for their tech savvy and timely regulation of tech industry.
This is a very relevant read (PDF): https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Ot...
You're never gonna find all the antennas inside a product the size of a television. Some will be part of the circuit boards.
Seems a worthy idea if you’re concerned about tracking, but I don’t see this idea around so I must be missing a downside.
If instead of a chair-desk-monitor you're sitting at a couch 5 times further from the screen, the equivalent screen size is 5 times larger, so 75" for the equivalent of what a 15" monitor gives you at your desk.
Turns out it wasn't the WiFi like we suspected, the TV was apparently just poorly coded junk. It's smooth playing on the new device (apart from the time it crashed and needed a reboot). My only complaint is that it associated with my YouTube account but it's a shared TV, so the main screen has watching suggestions based on what I have personally watched and I cannot 'log out' of YouTube alone. This is annoying, but it's Google, so what is privacy? I guess I can make a new account.
There’s lots of griping about the cost of an Apple TV 4k, but I’ll pay that extra $100 to avoid ads and not be tracked so extensively.
* https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/01/fbi-smart-tv-security/
Samsung actually released a TV app to tell you what it's doing:
* https://fortune.com/2020/01/18/samsung-smart-tv-data-privacy...
Which is nice, in a way, but it'd be better if they just didn't.
I'd be much more trusting of Apple TV being connected to the Internet than with a smart TV.
It seems to work well.
https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...
2. Wait until your smart TV starts using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to by-pass it. (Paul Vixie will be proved right eventually IMHO.)
h.264 and h.265 are the dominant codecs, regardless.
And Netflix found that h.265 consumed less bandwidth than vp9, not more: https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/18/4k-youtube-videos-still-not-c...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/3/21500399/apple-tv-youtube...
If you already own an extra gamepad, then it's worth a try and doesn't cost extra. There's a few gems in Apple Arcade, which was a surprise.
Thanks, this is nice to know! I'll keep this in mind for whenever I'm ready to replace my Roku.
Mainly because it doesn’t take batteries, is flat, works great with my phone, and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.
I do pick it up the wrong way a lot, but it’s better than all other devices I’ve tried- fire, roku, tv, wd.
Just not having to find doubleA batteries in the past few months has made me accept it.
> and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.
Interesting! This goes to show how the same design feels so different to different users :)
I think I could've gotten used to the touchpad if I spent a lot more time with with the apple-tv/remote, but at the time it felt like a big regression. Compared to the roku remote, i'd lose a mute button, a headphone jack for private listening, and ended up with a touch heavy interface that was more frustrating than useful considering me and wife would pick it up the wrong way a lot. At the end of the day I decided to stick with a Roku and have something that doesn't frustrate my wife, instead of trying to get used to the remote just to have the apple tv interface :)
My normal LG TV remote works fine for controlling it
I generally use the built in remote app on my iPhone though - it’s accessible from control center, and my phone is usually easier to find than the remote at any given moment.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Generation-Silicone-Controller...
- My four year old can search for shows by asking Siri instead of needing to type
- When we're all watching together you can slide your finger over the touch surface to make one of the icons wobble in 3D. It's great when you're asking which episode someone would like to watch, you can highlight and focus the UI for them
- No batteries and charges by lightning. I never had those R2032 batteries for the Aluminium remote whenever it ran out
Agreed on lifting it up the wrong way every time. I bought a few cheap silicon covers for mine in bright colours and it really helps
But it being made out of glass. What where they thinking?! You know how I orient the Apple TV remote now? My fingers know where the broken glass is on it. Making that out of glass was so beyond a dumb idea that I can't begin to imagine what they were thinking.
The end result is, I love the Apple TV, but I don't know that I'll ever buy another one if the remote continues to be made of glass.
Make it OLED, dumb TV, instant on, Apple TV box plugs in. Separate box with front facing ports that connects to screen with one cable. A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?).
This entire market is in desperate need of someone to make something decent.
The best available option today is LG and it’s still laden with ads and takes a few seconds to boot up.
I love that a sibling comment to yours calls out the remote as dealbreaker terrible, but I agree with the sentiment that I would love a remote that was really well-designed.
- it’s impossible/difficult to do with current tech (not true)
- the classic Apple forum response of “why would you want to do that?”
This turned into a bit of a rant but I’ll conclude the thought by saying that there’s certainly some sort of happy medium between a gajillion buttons on the remote and lack of absolutely critical functionality. In fact if you invest a bit of extra money into the Sideclick add-on to Apple TV remote you achieve exactly that.
Who would’ve thought it’s necessary to be able to grab the remote when it’s dark and know what orientation it is in.
People on HN complain about this a lot, but I’ve used it for years and had parents use it without issue. I think it’s a made up problem.
The other buttons I’d have on it would be power, and input switch.
I’d have an Apple HomePod sound bar which connects to the tv so you don’t have to configure any of that.
Then you’d use the Apple TV remote like normal for everything else. The regular dial remote is just always sitting on the coffee table.
Alternatively they could extend the existing Apple TV remote a bit to add a mute and volume knob or reconfigure to be the one remote for the dumb tv and the Apple TV.
Heck, the stand for the mac pro monitor is $999.
Look at the price of Mac mini.
Sharp offers (most of) their range as dumb TVs[1]. They still take a few seconds to turn on, but not notably longer than a typical computer monitor.
1. https://sg.sharp/products/tv?filters%5B33%3A36%5D=33%3A36
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sharp-to-americans-you-dont-wan...
Hopefully that means there are better options this year?
At any rate, according to Google it seems to be over[1] and Sharp took back control in 2019.
1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sharp-hisense-idUSKCN1SE1...
I'd prefer the remote as an app on my phone. My desk is covered with remotes. Remotes are so 1980s :-/
Me OK Google mute
Me> OK...Google....mute
Me> OKGOOGLE mute
G> Sorry, I don't understand
Me> mute...
Me> MUTE MUTE MUTE MUTE MUTE
Me> OKGOOGLE MUTE
G> What would you like to mute?
Me> The TV
Me> Mute the fucking TV Google
Me> OKGOOGLE MUTE THE FUCKING TV
G> Sorry, I don't understand
Me> Fuck it. I should have just looked for the controller to begin with.
I end up with some vulgarities and ask my children to do it the old fashioned way (that is to tap the name on their phones, not to use smoke signals)
And we usually end up insulting Alexa as well.
C: bla bla bla, if you want to speak to a representative say "representative".
Me: representative
C: sorry i couldn't understand, please chose an option or say representative to speak with one
Me: re-pre-sen-ta-tive
C: (same answer as before)
Me: REPRESENTATIVE
C: (same answer as before)
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF
C: Ok, I'll call a representative
I want to believe that their system either sensed the tension in my voice or saw the expletive and decided to call for adult supervision.
I'm not an native English speaker so I have an accent (which isn't too heavy, but still). Using any form of speech recognition is an instant fuck-show.
Die apps, die. I want dedicated remotes for lights, stereo, curtains, garage door, and TV.
Apps won’t be around – forget 20 years, 5 years if you’re lucky. A company can disappear along with its stupid fucking app.
About the only advantage an app has is a keyboard.
Absolutely true, which makes a good argument also for going back to websites and pages (HTML5 helps a lot) instead of the apps business model that basically brought us back to the pre-www era. Also regarding the phone (mis)use as remote, why nobody mentions latency? Every smartphone I tried had an absolutely atrocious UI latency even compared to my 30 years old Amiga 500, why should I want to use it instead of a dedicated device that does the job immediately and I can substitute with 5€, and sometimes even repair?
We heard you like remotes, so how about a remote with dedicated, non-reprogrammable buttons to open apps you never use that don't even exist anymore?
Sincerely, Roku
They can also disappear and when you lose your remote, too bad. (That's why remotes go for $$ on ebay.)
What we need might actually be a single remote for everything.
Re: a single remote for everything, the term for that is "universal remote", and not once have I been satisfied with one due to the difficulty and fragility of programming it. Maybe in this day and age we can finally make that programming dead simple and robust; Logitech came close with its universal remote from years ago, but even that still wasn't quite easy enough to setup and use to fully replace all my remotes. That HDMI-CEC or whatever it's called also comes close, but it's restricted to HDMI, obviously leaving non-HDMI devices in the dust.
I've been meaning to hack an old phone to be an instant-on remote with some custom software, but there are always dozens of higher priority projects. If anyone wants to hire/partner with me to build such a thing though...
Using any form of technology? Without dropping one side or the other into an irreparable state that requires power cycling one or both ends at least once and then hoping for the best?
It’d be cool if it worked, by my expectation is that it’ll be implemented by the guy in charge of that YouTube “cast” app that has only theoretically worked one time in a lab in Palo Alto.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-best-feature-of-...
Presumably will still boot slowly and only the topmost UI layer loads differently, and until they confirm otherwise I’m guessing that even with a simplified UI it still includes all the creepy tracking of everything you watch.
https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
Android TV might not build it in, but much like android phones, you get extra “features” from pretty much every OEM.
Evidence is a high bar. But I can tell you my f...ing smart tv asks me on behalf of tv stations to accept cookies when I switch to some german tv stations. Yes, I'd say they are tracking what I am watching. That is with TV over satellite in Germany.
An Apple branded TV, even if it is without the TV part or just a monitor would have to be at least 2-3x the price of today's similar TV sets. And if anything OP were only willing to paid an extra $100 is probably why Apple didn't make one.
Some of the TV in the industry isn't just on Low Margin. They are entering negative margin territory if you are discounting Data Selling and software / partner sponsorship.
Unless the cost electronic part continue to raise to the point where Apple has an advantage with their SoC.
I think one of their original purpose or intention for ProXDR was the use the Dual Layer LCD technology to create something like a true Reference Display Monitor. But the technology and cost never got to that point. At least I hope they could continue their investment in that area even if they do not intend it to be in consumer usage.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710734
People would absolutely pay $1000-1200 for a 55" Apple TV with nice software, and maybe a nice brushed aluminum frame that looks nice on the wall.
(For comparison, the cheapest 55" I could quickly find from a major retail is around $300, with a "name brand" starting around $400).
However I can still watch Disney on it using airplay from my OG iphone SE (2016). As far as consumer electronics go, apple is well ahead of the pack.
(Samsung LSP7 is $3,500)
5-10 years? I know I'm not on the latest technology step. But 4K isn't worth me upgrading perfectly functional TVs. Maybe if we get to reasonably priced OLED panels but I'm not in a big hurry to upgrade TVs that are working.
I actually took home quite a few (3-4) more expensive TVs from Costco before buying the TCL, and it was far and away the best set while also being 1/2 to 1/3 the price.
It would be the best of Apple product to show off.
They could offer three sizes. Mini, Normal, Max.
They could use it as a jumping off point to own the “living room” if they wanted.
And if that specific LG model charges 3 to 5K, Apple will have to sell it at 6 to 10K.
Edit: I think I need to spell things out a little more clearly. If Apple were to use OLED and aim at a top tier market, then it would be competing directly with LG TV, which also happens to be gaining momentum in terms of both OLED display panel ( LG Display ) and TV set ( LG Electronics ). LG Display will also need to built new Fab for Apple. The recent expansion at Guangzhou doubling their capacity, AFAIK has already been booked and has no relation to Apple. i.e LG has little interest to do it with Apple given they are already fully booked on capacity. And Apple doesn't seems to be interested in pushing LG to partner.
The answer to if Apple could do something will always going to be yes given they have hundreds of billions of cash and has little idea what to do with it other than buying back stocks.
The answer to if Apple will do it is always going to complex. And nothing in the supply chain and BOM cost analysis suggest it is a good strategy worth going for.
I do wish Apple prove wrong though.
While this option is certainly not available to all, it is the only thing that will really fit your needs. I completely gave up on finding anything decent in that market.
What usability / long-term reliability perk does your own software running on a RPI have over an Apple TV plugged into a dumb TV / monitor?
I would say not "hn user" level folks, more like "i have a gaming pc".
Everyone's idea of 'simple' is rather asinine, unimaginative.
The latest Pis come practically preinstalled with everything, just have to load Kodi.
But someone who has found 'their' solution i.e. some crap by Apple e.g. assumes this is how everything should be... And we all get stuck with crappy 'smart' TVs (or don't own one - I have survived 10+ years without a TV - absolutely nothing about TVs today makes me want one. So much hot garbage)
My own solution has the pros:
- I control precisely what I need and what not, both in terms of features and in terms of usability
- I control when it gets changed/updated
- I control which data flows in and out of the system
- Your device is not a brick when the manufacturer decides to end the support or shuts down the wrong server
The obvious downside is that it means work and requires a certain set of skills. Whether it is worth it or not depends on how important that thing is for you and how much all the TVs suck at doing what you want in the way you want it done.
[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/build-the-ultimate-4k-home-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21438152
But that would be a TV which you can't use to watch adult content. And Netflix and HBO would be 30% more expensive.
same thing is happening with TVs. This crap subsidizes the price of the TV, so then the $279 tv looks more attractive than the more expensive tvs without ads/tracking/data gathering (which then disappear)
“Why TVs Have Become So Inexpensive“ => https://youtu.be/NWwawTnT7LM
The highest end TVs I see also have ads. So I don’t think this factors into the price at all. It’s just bonus profits on top of existing profits.
If ad data subsidized prices significantly, I wouldn’t expect it in $4,000 TVs. Am I supposed to believe that the TV would be $4,050 without ads? It seems strange that high end TVs would care about these small amounts.
I think this is just a cover story by marketers to garner sympathy.
I've never seen an ad on the Chromecast - it simply plays a stream as instructed by an app on the phone. Is it different with the Fire Stick?
It has some black magic whereby it ignores local dns setting as far as I can tell. I blocked port 53 at firewall and sent it back to a Pihole.
Good times.
Im betting my savings this is far from enough, its Google sw, they smart AF. Send that thing back to where you bought it better :)
[0]: https://gist.github.com/roycewilliams/dd13c8f4a3371a57f8dd82...
Also fun fact, the Shield TV is the longest supported Android device in existence
(https://www.androidauthority.com/nvidia-shield-tv-25th-updat...)
I wouldn’t trust the world’s biggest tracking company not to track me.
You’re kind of moving laterally there. (From trusting Smart TV to trusting Google.)
(My dumb TV is a projector, one of the best decisions we've made in the past 5 years.)
I am curious because in France at least there is only the top banner on the home screen, which I do not even see as I directly jump into an app.
Beyond Apple, you should expect individual Apple TV apps to track by default.
Apple probably has some sort of tracking system, but they're hardly a tracking monopolist, not even on their own devices.
If we're talking about the original, non-4k Fire TV Stick, then yes. The 4k version is speedy, but still laden with ads.
I recently purchased a Roku Streaming Stick Plus ($39 USD on Amazon — that's ~20% the price of an Apple TV) because I found out that they natively supported AirPlay 2. If you're looking for an ad-free experience, VPN out to an unsupported country and create a Roku account there. You'll be able to add less "channels", but Roku also stops trying to hard-sell you on subscriptions.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-best-feature-of-...
We use the same word for governance as we do for data: the state.
Having a hardcopy DVD, a dump player, and a dumb TV allows you to partake of the state you own without the State (or its BigTech owners) hassling you.
Much to be said for that.
Apparently the margins on commodity hardware like TVs are too small. Someone did bring up and interesting idea of running a batch released product based on something like a Kickstarter though.
Example search here: https://www.cdw.com/Search/computer-monitors-displays/large-...
Looks like you can't check out without an account, but I'm sure you could find a shop that would sell you one.
Here is a basic one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1242029-REG/samsung_3...
It looks like since I last checked the "smart" is creeping in, but these are designed to "accept input, and display it" so it's as close as we can get without custom manufacturing.
A Samsung at 55 inches for $600 is perfect for my needs.
So much for the lie about TVs need ads to keep the price reasonable.
The move for me was never, not even at setup, connecting my new TV to wifi and simply routing everything through the Apple TV.
Seems to be working great so far at avoiding a lot of common “smart TV” problems.
Maybe Framework's next product should be a dumb TV, perhaps based on the latest LG OLED panels.
In addition to not having the ecosystem network effects from modules and upgrades that notebooks (our first category) have, TVs are extremely difficult logistically. You need to be able to get really great financing terms and freight rates to be able to have huge thousand dollar objects sitting on boats, trains, and trucks for weeks at a time.
I think he means that without ads they wouldn’t make as much so they would have to charge more to make the same amount of money they would with ads (which is the same they used to make).
(The referred article seems to have disappeared, but the archive saves: http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... )
https://www.samygo.tv/
The linked page does not contain the word "virus" or "malware"
now it's a redirect to https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00077524/
Yea this is benefit decreases every day. The "cord-cutting" phenomenon is dead. Want to watch a discovery show? Oh great, it's only on Discovery plus now, $5 a month. Want to watch Premier League soccer? Peacock Premium! Cobra Kai? Netflix... marvel? Disney+. Oh but you can't watch THIS nfl game on here because it's blacked out locally for TV. Champions League soccer? Sign up for CBS All Access. Can't forget HBO Max!
When you add everything up, cable for me was actually cheaper. But now I'm screwed, because they aren't putting shows on TV channels anymore to get people to sub to their streaming service.
Doesn't work well for sports, admittedly.
Before I upgraded to LG last year I had a Samsung and it was trying to ping home constantly. It constituted 80% of outbound requests denied by the PiHole
By "fake gateway" I mean a non-existing IP on your LAN: that way, no outgoing request from the offending MAC address will ever get out to the public Internet.
Take it to backyard and axe it to pieces. Just to be sure.
For an actual arms race, we need vendors on the consumer side front to create beautiful Faraday Cages for "your" home appliances.
[1] There's a couple 4k test videos in the system menu, which I guess is some of the hugeness. Seems crazy though.
I removed my PiHole once I got NextDNS as it just seemed redundant.
I can't install NextDNS client on a lot of devices like a robot vacuum. Sure you can configure NextDNS to be the resolver on the gateway, but then the gateway becomes the only client in your NextDNS logs and you can't figure out which device is downloading Google ads, which makes the log useless. It is also easier to temporarily disable filters -- changing DNS on some routers may need a rebooting, which causes downtime on the whole home network.
The only thing you can do with NextDNS logs is looking at them on NextDNS web UI. I had a lot of fun messing with my local AdGuardHome logs with visualizations, analysis, and alerting.
The cold start time is absurdly high, the basic feature of a TV - built in OTA TV player has a bug that the channel display stays on forever, the Airplay frequently play video with no sound. The only fix is find the 3 level deep restart menu item, because power on / off doesn’t matter. I would be more than happy to pay more for a normal Sony TV, with a “not using Google Android TV” label.
Also -- you can restart by holding the power button on the remote, then choosing "Restart".