I WISH they would make a comeback. Smart TVs are the single worse piece of (shit) consumer electronics on the market. Any time you take anything electronic and connect it to the internet you're asking for trouble. Throw an operating system in it controlled by parasitic advertisers and that's where we are today.
Thinking about it too much makes me furious. We have supercomputers in our pockets and TVs but it all spies on us and nobody gives a shit because everything is cheap. It's a Faustian deal that sucks! Nobody would actually choose this yet here we are.
I have the alternative of just plugging in an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, whatever Google or Amazon makes, any computer with a digital video out port, tons of IPTV boxes that stream tons of pirated channels.
All I have to do is not put my wifi password into the TV.
For now. We are probably going to start seeing manufacturers, shipping, TVs and other devices with LTE chips built into them, so they can go around our Wi-Fi to get the sweet sweet data. At that point, my biggest fear is that all the people (myself included) who thought we were being clever by depriving the TV of the Wi-Fi password are going to be sad that we didn't instead throw our money behind a manufacturer building ethical products.
There are existing brands that sell dumb TVs. Sceptre is one that I'm fond of. They compete on they aren't the cheapest usually but quite reasonable. Most people want to buy cheaper "smart" TVs though and deprive them off the Wi-Fi password, which makes it harder for dumb TV manufacturers to stay in business and get cheaper through economies of scale, which further compound the problem.
I’d really like to go with a dumb set, but their panels seem way behind.
Comparing their flagship 86” set: U860CV-UMRD (claimed) to Hisense U8 (measured, native/worst case):
3000:1 vs. 9449:1 contrast
300cd/m2 vs. 910+ brightness
60hz vs 144hz.
The hisense is significantly cheaper, so I think the comparison is fair.
Oddly, sceptre reports percent of NTSC gamut and not a modern color space. The percentage doesn’t imply poor color representation, but its a strange choice.
We already see signs that it might head this way. Numerous IoT junk (Facebook portal and Google Home Minis come to mind), will ignore DHCP-provided DNS servers and use their own (usually 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8 respectively) if they don't get successful connections to their mothership. My devices are old enough that they don't try DoH, but I'd be shocked if most of these haven't moved to that by now.
So, does the FCC allow LTE jammers in any form or power level, nowadays? Because that's a compelling reason to burn the entire connectivity industry down.
Edit: probably easier to open it up and simply disconnect the LTE antenna.
It's also never been connected to the internet, and my router also has a static IP reservation to give the TV an IP that is not on my subnet in case someone in my house ever tries to connect it to the internet.
I agree but the reason they were cheaper was hidden. If spying were an opt-in popup that says "spy on me" nobody would choose the spying. It won through sleight of hand.
> Any time you take anything electronic and connect it to the internet you're asking for trouble.
you said if I have an electronic device and connect it to the internet I am asking for trouble :) phone was AMAZING before some moron connected them the internet and now they are “smart…”
Windows offered me 3 separate subscriptions during setup. After managing to decline all 3 and complete setup, it then re-ran the Windows setup process a week later to help me "finish setting up", where it re-offered all 3 subscriptions.
I don't see the problem here. Badgering you to subscribe to some crap helps make more profit for MS, and this is good for MS shareholders. It might make the user experience worse, but who cares about that? It's not like Windows users are ever going to abandon the platform, so what's wrong with making them miserable in order to increase profits?
That's great, really, but people like you are a tiny minority. MS can afford to lose a very small number of customers, since they'll much more than make up for the loss by doing anti-user stuff like baking ads into the OS. In the last 40 years, I just haven't seen very many people get fed up enough with MS to leave, and instead I've watched MS's stock price and valuation continue to rise.
Well Microsoft already lost the consumer market. Apple and Android dwarf Windows market share. Microsoft is an also-ran for consumers. Where they still have some presence is corporate productivity and gaming, both of which are eroding. The future is not bright for Microsoft.
>Well Microsoft already lost the consumer market. Apple and Android dwarf Windows market share.
For phones, sure, but we're talking about PCs here. MS hasn't tried anything in the smartphone market for ages now. Android isn't a PC OS at all, and Apple's laptop and desktop computers are a tiny fraction of MS's.
>Where they still have some presence is corporate productivity and gaming, both of which are eroding.
"Some presence" is a huge understatement. The corporate world is still mostly running on Windows, unfortunately. Macs are not a serious contender here at all except maybe for some design stuff. Their domination for gaming might be eroding, but they're still highly dominant here too.
>The future is not bright for Microsoft.
Their financials look excellent right now. Of course, they're actually pretty smart, pushing into cloud services and such instead of just clinging to OS sales, so that'll probably continue.
I'd love to see everyone suddenly switch to various Linux distros and for MS to dry up overnight, but I just don't see it happening in the real world.
People have changed habits: most people do not use a PC for their everyday computing. They use a smartphone, and at a stretch, a tablet. There are a sizable number of people, not weirdos who don’t use tech but the average person who does banking and gaming and books flights and checks instagram, who has never used a desktop or laptop outside of an office. It’s all mobile devices. It’s Apple and Android.
This is apparent if you frequent social media that isn't tech focused like HN.
Spend a bunch of time on reddit and it becomes incredibly clear: The extreme majority of people on the Internet (In the USA, at least) are doing it from a phone or tablet.
According to some rumors, Valve is currently developing a Linux-based computer with software stack ported from Steam Deck. If the rumor is true and the device will be good, Microsoft will be very surprised with how many people will switch from Windows 11 into that new platform.
MacOS will gladly serve Taboola ads in first-party apps and beg you to use Safari in push notifications. If that's not infiltration by advertisement, I'm not sure what is.
Really? What apps have ads? Never seen that. My personal MacBook is too old for the last few MacOS updates but I haven’t seen what you describe on my up-to-date work laptop.
> MacOS will gladly serve Taboola ads in first-party apps and beg you to use Safari in push notifications
You may think you are ‘sticking it to Apple’ by making-up this sort of thing, but what you’re actually doing is ruining the debate, and disempowering the customers who are trying to improve the situation.
I’ve been using MacOS for over 25 years, and never seen a “Taboola ad” in an Apple application, or received any push notification about using Safari as my browser (which I willingly do anyway).
I have "free offers" for Apple Fitness, Apple Music, Apple News+ sitting in the Settings app on my iPhone 16 Pro, not sure how that's any different from the Windows offers (and until you ignore them at least once, they even show up with a badge on the App icon to draw you in).
I only ever use mine as monitor ("PC mode") and have a different device drive it. It would take some major market dysfunction to lose large monitors with this feature.
A quick search for "Dumb TV" on amazon shows two Sceptre models, a 43-inch and a 50-inch. The 43-inch model says it's been ordered 500+ times in the last month and the 50-inch claims 50+. There is also a Pro Scan 40 inch that doesn't have ethernet connectivity. So they do exist, and it looks like there is at least some sales activity with them. I don't know if that's the last dying breath of the dumb tv as a product or if they are trying to make a comeback, though.
I own a smart TV that was at least partially subsidized by the mess of ads I see on the home page. But when manufacturers make a high quality panel, I’m not really convinced there’s a market for dumb TVs - people just use their own box if they want, and the marginal cost of the electronics required may even be negative now that Android/Google TV can also handle TV settings while providing a new revenue source.
I've an old dumb 1080p Samsung TV. Apart from the panel not being up to date everything about it is better than the smart version that I bought 8 years later.
I looked into this briefly. Many TVs run Linux under the hood, and can be flashed, as the firmware is available because of the GPL. (Sometimes. Vizio had to be sued into doing so iirc.) so "all" that has to be done is to repackage and rewrite some firmware, reflash the TV to only ever use HDMI1, and Bob's your uncle.
The problem (aside from the fact that redoing the firmware isn't trivial - but that's the fun part) is that TVs are big and bulky, and come in multiple sizes and resolutions. And then shipping them around the country gets expensive, limiting reach, and then that means that taking returns also becomes difficult too. Especially because you'd be reboxing existing televisions to begin with. But maybe you could open up a storefront to sell these from and serve a local area first.
Anyway, this is more a comment on the issues with this as bother me, and not an indightment of the whole idea. Someone else with a lot more capital to bootstrap could pull it off - assuming there really is enough of a market for such a product. It might be like the support for a small phone contingent or light truck. There's a vocal crowd that does exist, but they don't exist in great enough quantity relative to the rest of the market, leading to not enough sales to support a business built on that singular premise.
The other issue is HDCP. If the Apple/Google TV won't play high res content to your modified firmware,
the idea's dead in the water without an additional device like from hdfury, but at that point, how many customers are just going to put up with a "smart" tv?
I've owned several lcd tvs and several tv boxes. A big problem with smart tvs is the difference in lifetimes between the two.
Tv boxes have a maybe 3 year lifetime before they get kind of junky. Lcd tvs go at least 5 years, sometimes much longer.
If you have a smart tv, around year 3 or 4, you're going to want to hook up a (new) tv box, but you're still going to have to fight the built in OS anyway, at least a bit.
Economics of ads subsidizing the tv aside, it makes more sense to have the tv firmware be focused on the essentials like responding to user input quickly and if it has a tuner not locking up on poor or malformed signals, and the user can choose between the tv box ecosystems they like.
Separately, it'd be nice if the tv box ecosystem got some more longevity... Maybe that will happen soon. 4k@60fps with dolby vision and/or hdr10+ seems like a likely plateau of streaming video for a while... if they'd start regularly putting in 1g ethernet to handle peak bandwidth of 4k BluRay rips, things would be pretty good. 8k seems unlikely to get mainstream adoption (but I could be wrong)
I would love to see this happen. In some ways, it's a story of the wrong system boundaries and modules. A mismatch between component age, manufacturer expertise, and how long software needs to keep being updated or patched.
You can see a similar phenomenon in car media systems, where the solution is an interface (e.g. Android Auto or Apple CarPlay) allowing the vehicle to be "dumber" but more reliable and robust over time. [0]
Televisions can be rescued even more easily, since we already have standards and conventions from the past to use.
[0] For folks unfamiliar with those systems, basically the car's touch-screen becomes an extension of your phone.
There are always many hundreds of options for "dumb TVs", the secret being that they're called "commercial [TVs|monitors|displays]". For example, B&H lists 2,105 so-called commercial displays as I type this (which you can easily filter to your specifications).
Here's a dumb 43 inch screen. It's sold as a gamer monitor. It's a UHD TV display with HDMI in and no onboard smarts.[1]
Here's another Samsung dumb screen, at 55 inches.[2] This is supposed to be for digital signage, but it's really a UHD monitor with HDMI in. But the next size up has "Alexa built in".
Sceptre, which mostly supplies Walmart, has a whole line of dumb TVs, including some big ones.[3] They're a little company in City of Industry, CA, which seems to have found their niche in dumb TVs.
There are lots of "digital signage" displays available. They're usually very bright, reasonably rugged, OK for 24/7 operation, immune to burn-in (they may spend their whole working life displaying mostly the same fast food menu), but not that good
I raise Sceptre every time I see this sentiment, but folks just don't seem to know about them. I got a humble 54" 4k from them a couple of years back for a few hundred bucks. Used it every day since, works great. Zero bullshit.
Sceptre's TVs don't seem to support 120 Hz or variable refresh rate yet, only their smaller monitors, so they're not a good fit for anybody with a current-generation video game console.
Last time I tried to find a Sceptre, the only things in stock were models that were several years old, with features comparable to TVs that were even older.
Viewsonice, Benq, and even Samsung make dumb monitors for conference rooms and digital signage. They just are more expensive and people don’t want the added cost. Its like consumer grade laptops are loaded with adware that supplements the price paid, compared to enterprise line of laptops which are more expensive.
Who is this article for? I don't disagree with it, but manufacturers aren't somehow unaware of any of it. They don't want to manufacture dumb TVs. They're the ones _currently_ manufacturing smart TVs.
Plus, there is the problem that the vast majority of consumers want smart TVs due to a combination of subsidized lower price and "simplicity" (e.g., they may be worse but they are simpler)
Just do your homework before purchasing to make sure this is possible.
In this vein, I just bought a Hisense QD6 series TV from Costco. I run it in "store" mode connected to a PC and it serves well as just a big, dumb 4K display.
It is still creepy to have tech in my home that is trying to betray me, even if it isn’t successful. Also you never know if some well-intentioned person might connect it to wifi.
I have a smart TV but drive it externally, if you even visit the wifi menu, it will nag you about not being connected until it is rebooted. It has never touched the network.
Or they start to require internet access before you can use the device. Even if it's periodic. Once a month you have to connect to the internet to validate your license and agreement, wherein it uploads your watch history and downloads new ads.
The box will still be warm from the warm of the store I bought it from when I take it back for a return. How’s that thing going to work at my remote cabin?
I did this with a Samsung TV I got recently. I works great. I am really not sure why everyone is upset. If you don't want to use the smart features, you don't have to. All you have to do is not connect the smart TV to the Internet.
Manufacturers make recurring revenue by invading the privacy of "dumb" users with their "smart" TVs.
It's probably only a matter of time before TV manufacturers establish their own ad networks.
Why? Because they can. They have the ability to fully control *their* "smart TV" (that you paid for) and show you ads that they control --- independent of any programming.
The EU couldn't fix the EU-US privacy framework even for the third try, and when the previous one have been invalidated by the CJEU, nobody bat an eye and continued to do the same thing.
GDPR is simply ignored by any bigger US company, it took 5 years for NOYB to facebook get fined which was less than 0.3% of their income, basically a small tax, not a huge fine.
Also GDPR is full of inconsistency (face biometric data is special data, but a photo of your face from what anybody can get the biometric data is not) and loopholes (required by law, legitimate interest).
They did something, but I wouldn't call that "a long way".
I work for a very large US company and can assure you that GDPR is something we pay a lot of attention to. This isn't the opinion of my employer, but my personal experience is that the big players take it seriously and meet and exceed all their obligations because it's too risky not to, and they have the necessary local legal teams to understand the law as best as is possible.
I think it's the small/medium companies who are where most of the issues are. Small companies write a non-legalese privacy policy because they think that's better for their users, but in fact have written something legally meaningless that gives their users no protections. Some small companies just don't know their obligations because they think they won't apply as they're not in the EU.
Then there are the companies who are big enough to know better, but small enough to know they can get away with it because all the scrutiny goes to big tech. I was asked by a medium sized advertising network to implement a keylogger on our website at my previous company so that the network could enforce their revenue sharing by detecting all user data input into our site and match it against their records. I laughed them out of the room, but they made it very clear this was how everyone did it.
> Some small companies just don't know their obligations because they think they won't apply as they're not in the EU.
To be fair, unless a company has a business presence in the EU there is nobody to sue for GDPR violations. The EU cannot enforce its laws on an entity which isn't under its jurisdiction at all.
Okay, with "any bigger US company" I thought mostly about Facebook and similar companies, of which many does continuously break GDPR rules even after many decisions and fines (simply because their business model is incompatible with privacy / data protection).
But it is still true, that nothing happened after the Schrems II judgment, and many-many companies continued to transfer personal data to providers affected by FISA.
GDPR is closely adhered to by big American companies. They may be the only ones to whom the EU is applying regulatory pressure on this. Chinese and Indian companies, on the other hand, as well as any non-enterprise American company, including start-ups, on the other hand, can and do safely ignore it. (Or follow it in broad strokes.)
> ... GDPR is simply ignored by any bigger US company, it took 5 years for NOYB to facebook get fined which was less than 0.3% of their income, basically a small tax, not a huge fine. ...
From my experience working at multiple companies, and having interacted with others, the GDPR is not ignored by American companies. websites based out of the US block EU users to avoid fines, or these US based companies which don't block EU users have gone out of their way to comply with the GDPR as interpreted by their respective legal department.
Really?
They've been working hard on a mass surveillance legislation (which would outlaw encryption) for a couple years now, it was thankfully voted down in 2023 because of a successful public outcry, but that didn't stop these gestapo assholes, they're gonna "reword it" and keep pushing it and eventually the public will have fatigued and stopped caring and it will go through.
I wish people would stop regurgitating this obvious lie. You can’t walk 3 feet without bumping in to something that is better for you because of regulation.
My motorcycle has a rev limiter for a reason. If you let the motor run wide open it will fail catastrophically. Economies are no different.
If you think regulation doesn’t work then you’re simply ignorant of how even basic parts of your daily life work.
you are programmed to think this way because you will focus on some
“good regulations” and say “look, regulation in ____ caused all these positive things.” but regulation means that government decided what can or cannot be done. and government is run by people that spend 70+% of their time fundraising. and people that shell out money at said fundraisers will want things and return. and that leads to regulations which are not in the interest of people in general but you know… also regulation is a double-egded sword as you always imagine that regulation will “go your way cause you are smart and have common sense” but we both know (especially in the USA) that is not the case. every regulation made by one political party the other will do everything possible to remove once they get the power back and vice versa
Whether regulation is a good or a bad tool for solving problems is an opinion. It cannot, by definition, be "untrue". At most one can say that they disagree and cite evidence as to why.
What do you think about laws? Or lead in gas? Asbestos in your house? Are you one of these free thinkers who don't use seats belts because regulations are always bad?
Your last sentence makes no sense. Something can both be good, and be undesirable for government regulation. For example, it's good for me to eat vegetables. But it would be odious to have a law requiring me to eat X number of vegetables per day. Similarly, a person can be in favor of wearing seatbelts but opposed to a law requiring seatbelt use.
Your reasoning is flawed, eating vegetables or not basically only affects you and your health, not wearing a seatbelt turns you into a projectile against the general public.
It looks like a lot of people have taken this statement to be proof that the poster doesn't believe in 'regulation'. When I read this I believe the poster is pointing out how the US has a tendency to politicized anything with the word 'regulation' associated with it to the detriment of the issue involved. For what it is worth, I too see the attack on 'regulation' without context or thought and it makes it hard to accomplish things as a society, but it also forces you to think of other ways things could get done. Convincing people to vote with their wallets or just bringing bad press are also ways to influence this issue. I personally do think regulation has a very big place in this discussion but maybe if we explored other avenues more we could make progress as well.
There will always beeoptions without. Some tvs are used in industrial settings to show safety information. If someone dies and the tv was, showing ads instead of safety information there will be big lawsuits.
The more correct term would be Digital Signage displays, eg. [1] - they often run on high voltages though so it's better to be sure when screwing around with them
I've been buying the Samsung QB series at work lately. They're advertised as signage, and do function in more or less "dumb" mode - they work fine with no network connection. But they do run Tizen OS, which is less dumb than I'd like. Also worth mentioning that they're real nice, but also pretty spendy.
There are OLED digital signage displays, which won't have any issue with black levels. Colors might need calibrating but I doubt they use different panels for these from equivalent consumer TVs.
TCL is the same, as are likely every brand of TV. The smart tv hate is overhyped. All my TVs are dumb because they were smart but never got WiFi access.
I think this is the way, just don’t give it wifi access!
Fun story, my sony has android tv and can play MKV files off a flash drive (eg. a non-streaming tv show), but the built in player is horrible (drops frames?). Turns out I was able to find the right version of VLC player and adb the apk over the Ethernet port! Really worked a treat.
This avoided connecting it to wifi, but I still got what I wanted out of it.
They are not all the same --- even within the same manufacturer.
A lot of newer firmwares will launch into setup every time you power up if access is not configured. The TV configuration data is most likely being saved/retrieved from their cloud. This serves as their connectivity test.
Without wifi setup, my new Hisense 4k "budget" model does this *unless* you run it in "store" mode.
Dealing with setup on every power up is possible --- but obviously highly annoying over time --- and this is by design.
The manufacturers desperately want the data collection $. It's the only way some of them make money.
That's highly speculative, but even if that did end up happening, the smart TVs sold today wouldn't magically gain that capability, especially if you keep it off the network and never update it.
My money’s on a joint venture with Comcast, Cox, Verizon, et al. to use the Wi-Fi access points their routers operate – even if you use your own router and block them, your neighbors almost certainly don’t. Most them already have business ties and would love to have better ad targeting data.
Man, at that point I would open up the back and snip/desolder the antenna itself. I hate ads on my TV, ESPECIALLY when I've already paid for the damn thing!
I heard that some 2024 models refuse to go through the setup wizard without internet access. Not sure what happens if you disconnect it after setup though. But my Amazon Fire Stick already refuses to do anything without internet even though I could stream locally with vlc.
I wonder if this is a market specific thing, that is to say if it is turned on or off depending on which market you're in. For example I wonder if there are pertinent regulations applying in EU, if so I would expect it were turned off in EU.
“If you do not agree to this EULA, you do not have the right to use the Television or the Software. If you are within the allowable time period for returns under the applicable return policy, you may return the Television to your seller for a refund, subject to the terms of such return policy. You should perform a factory reset before you return it to erase data that may be stored on the Television.”
That being said, this is the first time I've ever seen an EULA be this brazen and predatory. Claiming that I'm not allowed to use the entire device because I don't agree to some post-sale contract? In writing? Are you sure you want to do that TCL?!?!?
It may depend on your jurisdiction but here in the USA, I'm pretty sure it's legal because they offer a full refund if you chose not to accept.
There are alternative ways to coerce users into playing along. For example, simply store/retrieve TV configuration in the cloud. Without connectivity configured, the TV starts over from scratch in device setup on every power up.
And connectivity obviously opens the possibility for other uses.
The reason why it's unenforceable is probably unconscionability. There is no value that the contract provides that wouldn't exist if there was no contract. You have a right to use hardware you own and the software that comes with it, just because you bought the device. It's not the EULA that allows you to use the TV and software, simply having it in your legal posession means you have the right to use it.
> I'm pretty sure it's legal because they offer a full refund if you chose not to accept.
They offer you the opportunity to get a refund from the retailer, subject to that retailer's return policies, which may mean "open box" restocking fees, time limitations or similar.
I'm cool with it provided I can use it as a very high quality HDMI display. Then I just got a nicely discounted product.
My worry is if they demand connectivity in order to work as a display. Or worse come with some kind of LTE transceiver to phone home then we're in trouble.
I'm cool with it provided I can use it as a very high quality HDMI display.
Most will work --- but not always *conveniently*.
On power up, a lot them will launch into setup if connectivity is not configured. Some may actually store/retrieve the TV configuration in their cloud.
I'm wondering if HDCP is paradoxically to the rescue here?
So the main concern with keeping it in dumb mode I would think is that they could still snoop in on your streams through the plain old HDMI port.
But if the HDMI is encrypted.....
With their antipiracy standard ....
God that would be amazing.
Also, I'm kind of surprised there isn't a raspberry pi open source project that does what those 20$ Roku fobs do.
Finally ... It kind of shows that hardware hacking is going downhill that there isn't a replacement os for the major brands of smart TVs. It's possible they've locked that down, but also the price points are so low you'd think they don't have the money to keep them out.
So the main concern with keeping it in dumb mode I would think is that they could still snoop in on your streams through the plain old HDMI port.
So they snoop. There's no value to be had in it if they can't report back to the mother ship. Without a line of communication, the "personalized" ads premise fails.
This doesn't make sense at all. HDCP doesn't change anything for the TV - either way the TV must be able to decode the signal to display it which means it can also analyze it and/or use subchannels supported by the other side for nefarious means.
For what it's worth, my LG TV (which is a few years old, to be fair) has never once showed up in my pi-hole's logs. We use an external box for the "smart" stuff, and the TV itself isn't up to any shenanigans as far as I can tell.
pi-hole uses DNS, and will give out fake ip addresses based on the name lookup.
Unfortunately it is NOT a firewall.
Any device can easily do its own DNS like DoH (dns over https), nnot involve pihole in name lookups, and send package directly to the destination ip address.
I used to have a rule on my firewall to redirect all internal 53/udp dns traffic to my local DNS server for just this reason. But with DoH, there’s really not much one can do to ensure a device is behaving without completely null routing that device.
I have an entirely separate VLAN network in my house for "appliances". Any access to the internet from that network has to be explicitly whitelisted in my router.
this is how i learned that taylor swift had a birthday recently. my samsung television advertised it to me on the ad banner that goes across the top third of the home screen of the television.
Reminder: They make them, they tend to be "monitors", "digital signage" or "commercial". You do have to pay a premium for them, for a variety of reasons.
There may be other options, I have a friend that 6-10 years ago got a TV, then opened it up and removed a USB stick that implemented all the smart features.
You seem to be downvoted by ad haters - ads being a sensitive topic - but in the context of a device made specifically for delivering ads, I agree it seems like a good idea.
In the context of being a reasonable human going about my business - I wouldn't want one anywhere near me.
I think they got downvoted because they misunderstood the idea. "mandatory" analytics and advertising would be working for the manufacturer, not the owner. To be an (antisocial) value-add it would have to work for the owner.
Another data point: Before all the smart TV stuff you would tend to pay significantly more for an A/V monitor (basically a TV without the tuner) than you would for a regular TV.
When talking about digital signage in particular, it's clearly a premium because it's such a big price difference. A discount for the bullshit would be much smaller.
I've been fairly happy with the Google/Android TV versions, but the primary feature I bought them for was the ability to pair bluetooth headphones with them. Bluetooth seems to be hard to get, but all Google TVs support them.
The lower end TVs can barely do the Google TV features, often being flaky. The higher end ones tend to implement the features much better, though not perfectly. My TLC 6xxx series is much less flaky than the 5xxx series, but I do sometimes have to reboot it at the beginning of every watching session, depending on the app.
Can’t you just pair your Bluetooth headphones to the device that is providing the video stream? That is the source, the TV should just be the output device.
When TVs started to be computers, they started to have computer problems: bugs, outdated software, freezing, and so on. Recently I needed to buy a smart TV to replace a 2015 one that was OK as a TV, but its operating system (...) was so outdated that it couldn't open the apps anymore.
This is easy: when we buy a smart TV we buy a TV plus a computer. I really would like pay less only for the TV, using the "smartness" of other "computer" (Chromecast, Apple TV, Fire Stick, videogame console, an old computer, etc). If the TV or the computer stopped working, it's just a matter of buying _only_ it.
If you don't mind paying more, they do exist in the form of digital signage / commercial displays. They're usually either completely dumb or support "smart" features via standardized pluggable modules, which can host a normal x86 computer, amongst other options.
They probably meant "a reasonable amount more". My understanding is that the digital signage/commercial displays are substantially more while often being lacking in features that are important to most consumers. I'd probably also be willing to pay a little bit more, but not very much since, at the moment, unless you are really paranoid about your privacy/spying to the point that you don't want the TV to even have the connectivity hardware at all, most of these issues can be solved by just never connecting it to the internet, having it default to immediately selecting on of your inputs (I don't know how common this feature is by my TCL can do it), and using whatever device you choose on that input.
You would have to. The smart features are there to generate ad revenue. It's part of the reason that TVs have gotten absurdly cheap over the past decade.
> But the public has spoken, again and again, with multiple goods. All that matters is price.
People say that, every time this discussion comes up, but never with any proof.
People buy OLED TVs with four-figure price tags. If those had a "pay $100 more and never see an ad" option, many people would pay for that.
The Kindle e-book reader still has both ad-supported and non-ad-supported models. The non-ad-supported options cost ~$20 (a bit less than 20%) more. Those still sell well enough to be worth selling both models.
Some people buy expensive OLEDs, but I suspect as a percentage of TV sales it’s quite low. As I said there can be a high end niche but it’s not going to be the majority.
All Kindles (except the kids model and the Signature Edition) have ads. Removing ads is basically an IAP which you can pre-buy at order time.
However we don’t know how popular that option is, so it’s not a terribly useful argument. All we do know is it’s not popular enough that they have given up and made them all ad free again.
I'm sitting here looking at a Samsung OLED that has lost bonding on it's panel (horizontal stripes).
The result is that that corporation is forever blacklisted.
The reason they dont exist (or rather that they exist but are rare) is because you, and me, are in the minority. Most people do not care if their tv is dumb and likely would be upset if their tv didnt have built in app support.
If there was a larger more vocal market for dumb tvs, they would exist more readily.
I wouldn't mind smart TVs if they were as serviceable as most computers. There was that Sharp M551 panel that had a Pi CM4 as the onboard CPU and that seems ideal: a modular, replaceable, upgradable board.
The fact that this both exists and is utterly unrealistic in the consumer space just makes it more infuriating.
Why not just... do the thing you want? IE, the solution you alluded to in your comment: have a dumb [which here exclusively means not internet-connected] TV with an externally "smart" device like a Chromecast?
This is essentially your own preferred solution to a problem that just cost you several hundred dollars when you "had" to replace your 2015 TV
It's not so simple. It's almost impossible to separate the "smart" side from the "dumb" side. Just like trying to use a smartphone and use only the phone, it won't make Android or iOS (and their pros and cons) disappear.
What’s my best bet if I just want a normal computer monitor hooked up to some sort of sound bar, and I’m happy using something like a Chromecast for all TV needs? Or are there monitors with good enough speakers now?
I’m not paranoid about Google, but smart TVs inevitably come with dreadfully slow boot times, clunky animated menus, and just generally lots of crap to work around, even if you primarily interact with them via HDMI. I miss TVs that respond before you take your finger off the button.
Soundbars are bad and there's better alternatives at soundbar price ranges imo. Spend the soundbar money on even a relatively humble set of logitech speakers for a really bare bones simple set up.
So what's the best solution? Suppose you have a dumb TV, or a smart TV locked to a single input. It seems like there are big downsides to most approaches. Rokus and Fire sticks have the same downsides as smart tvs, with ads and laggy interfaces. I currently have one output from my desktop hooked to my TV, but the UI leaves a lot to be desired and of course now I have two input devices to deal with, one for the TV and one for the PC. What's the best way to do it?
Find a decent media remote you can single hand with built in keyboard, i.e. lenovo n5902 (discontinued) - a bunch of cheap airmouse works pretty well. Setup macro for browser, boomarkts , microphone use etc. Adjust desktop UI scaling.
I bought my 65" TV for $299 recently, including shipping to my doorstep. Clearly all the bullshit that's baked into it is subsidizing the price by a lot.
I just never gave it network access and I use it like a dumb TV with a streaming box, so I get to benefit from a price subsidized by the the other 98% of the population who are getting exploited. The whole thing is kinda gross.
It's like there's this enshittification tipping point that you can't come back from. Realistically, who is going to buy a dumb TV at a much higher cost? People who are already savvy enough to get around a smart TV? People who aren't? I don't see it working.
>Realistically, who is going to buy a dumb TV at a much higher cost? People who are already savvy enough to get around a smart TV?
Exactly, that's why all this "I want a dumb TV!" stuff is, well, dumb.
It doesn't cost any less for a mfgr to make a dumb TV, in fact it would cost more. Modern TVs need a lot of computing power to make them work properly, so making the thing connect to the internet and show you ads really costs them nothing for hardware. Then they get to subsidize the TV with all the ad revenue, the kickbacks from the various streaming apps pre-installed, etc. A dumb TV would end up having the exact same hardware and a higher price tag. What kind of idiot would buy that? Not enough to make it worthwhile for the mfgr. If you don't want ads, just don't connect the TV to the internet.
It's a lot like modern Windows laptops that are cheaper than the same laptop with Linux pre-installed. MS and/or the laptop mfgr get a bunch of kickbacks from the crapware vendors to pre-install their crapware, so you end up paying less than you would for having the mfgr pre-install Linux (a free OS).
Just turn off the privacy invading features. LG’s options are pretty great, I’ve seen little bloat, and get the native apps for streaming services just fine.
Some dumb TVs still exist, only they’re called computer monitors now. And they’re a lot more expensive than TVs because TV-sized monitors are a niche product, and because manufacturers don’t subsidize them in exchange for your data.
There used to always be some smug commenter in these threads pointing out that life's better without any TV at all... Guess it's my turn.
Really - why bother? Can't you feel how it dominates the room? Don't you resent being constantly programmed by a handful of giant companies hiding behind different brands? Not to mention the ads shouting muck into your brain.
The main benefit of a giant HD TV - and please correct me if I'm wrong on this - is that the bigger and brighter the TV, the heavier the mental domination. After a long day/week working, you get to subside into the minima of mental and physical effort.
Relaxation and escapism are valid human pastimes, and we have 'choice' over what to watch to a higher degree than ever before... And it's a golden age for TV in many ways. But I can't help but feel that TV's hooks into people's minds are also more cunning than ever.
There isn't a nice way to say this, but... I can't help but notice that people who watch cable news, for example, become quite predictably wrong on important topics, and get very worked up over whatever the weekly outrage bait is. It's a toxic brew..
And the same goes for all kinds of other 'programming', from reality shows to celeb gossip to sportsball. Doesn't it ever feel like you're being... Subdued? Or even herded?
Okay but who uses a tv for cable news or any of that?
I want to put youtube channels on it while cooking in the kitchen, or play video games on it. Does anyone actually watch "TV" tv anymore? Isn't it mostly streaming services?
I removed all of the broadcast channels and it's now an excellent TV. The apps just work, it doesn't show me ads for anything, and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Am I just lucky to have found a good manufacturer?
My Hisense with Google TV has proven to be decent. I never connected the TV to the internet and went with an external Apple TV instead. It always starts on the last video input. I was able to refuse all the EULAs and was still left with all the visual niceties that I don't use like upscaling and motion smoothing.
Temporarily using a samsung smart TV is the reason I will sooner have no TV than a smart TV. Worst piece of tech I've ever used. I didn't have any of the smart stuff enabled; I was using it almost exclusively to display HDMI (I watched terrestrial TV for Eurovision once a year) and it was a kafkaesque nightmare. It took 15 minutes (when it worked) to go from standby to displaying HDMI. I had to reflash the damned firmware half the time I went to turn it on (from standby). I could go on for hours about it but I won't lol
However important, this is a niche problem. Most users will not be able use a dumb TV. Everything becomes more clunky for them. Instead of fighting the uphill battle of making legislation, more people should be made aware of the issue and the - not that complicated - ways to counter this.
Pihole, not giving internet (only local network) / and/or only use a trusted device via HDMI to display content.
Really? No legislation needed because people (that is, techies with network skills) can just set up piehole? (Until of course that stops working as well because the smart TVs use DoH, eSNI, certificate pinning, etc)
No legislation is desired because legislation implemented for this kind of purpose inevitably ends up co-opted by the very interests it's targeted against, who rely on it to create barriers to entry for competitors and roadblocks for DIYers, while entrenching their business model indefinitely.
Regulatory intervention will ultimately make things like PiHole difficult or impossible, while legitimizing "responsible" viewer tracking and mandatory internet connections for TVs.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadAll I have to do is not put my wifi password into the TV.
Comparing their flagship 86” set: U860CV-UMRD (claimed) to Hisense U8 (measured, native/worst case):
3000:1 vs. 9449:1 contrast
300cd/m2 vs. 910+ brightness
60hz vs 144hz.
The hisense is significantly cheaper, so I think the comparison is fair.
Oddly, sceptre reports percent of NTSC gamut and not a modern color space. The percentage doesn’t imply poor color representation, but its a strange choice.
Edit: probably easier to open it up and simply disconnect the LTE antenna.
Samsungs silently mesh network with other Samsung devices.
What? Supporting link?
It's also never been connected to the internet, and my router also has a static IP reservation to give the TV an IP that is not on my subnet in case someone in my house ever tries to connect it to the internet.
Consumers regularly vote with their wallets against their best interests.
What other options would those be? What non-"smart" OLED TVs exist on the market right now?
If they were unfit for purpose, they would have been returned.
Most people don’t care about being spied on.
When iOS let users opt out of tracking 96% opted out. If people don't care about being spied on then why do so many opt out?
you said if I have an electronic device and connect it to the internet I am asking for trouble :) phone was AMAZING before some moron connected them the internet and now they are “smart…”
They lost me for productivity 10 years ago and gaming 3 years ago.
I was a customer but I never will be again.
For phones, sure, but we're talking about PCs here. MS hasn't tried anything in the smartphone market for ages now. Android isn't a PC OS at all, and Apple's laptop and desktop computers are a tiny fraction of MS's.
>Where they still have some presence is corporate productivity and gaming, both of which are eroding.
"Some presence" is a huge understatement. The corporate world is still mostly running on Windows, unfortunately. Macs are not a serious contender here at all except maybe for some design stuff. Their domination for gaming might be eroding, but they're still highly dominant here too.
>The future is not bright for Microsoft.
Their financials look excellent right now. Of course, they're actually pretty smart, pushing into cloud services and such instead of just clinging to OS sales, so that'll probably continue.
I'd love to see everyone suddenly switch to various Linux distros and for MS to dry up overnight, but I just don't see it happening in the real world.
Spend a bunch of time on reddit and it becomes incredibly clear: The extreme majority of people on the Internet (In the USA, at least) are doing it from a phone or tablet.
According to some rumors, Valve is currently developing a Linux-based computer with software stack ported from Steam Deck. If the rumor is true and the device will be good, Microsoft will be very surprised with how many people will switch from Windows 11 into that new platform.
If you open up Books.app, you’d be surprised that it’s going to sell you books.
You may think you are ‘sticking it to Apple’ by making-up this sort of thing, but what you’re actually doing is ruining the debate, and disempowering the customers who are trying to improve the situation.
I’ve been using MacOS for over 25 years, and never seen a “Taboola ad” in an Apple application, or received any push notification about using Safari as my browser (which I willingly do anyway).
Try booting up Apple News. It's a recent change, but a real one and not "made up" in the slightest: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/taboola-apple-news-deal
> or received any push notification about using Safari as my browser (which I willingly do anyway).
Well that's probably why. Imagine how enthused I am to use MacOS knowing that my browser of choice isn't good enough to satiate Apple?
It is a real problem, too. Been one for ten long years, as a matter of fact: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253602135
"Do you want to use Chrome or Safari?" - _after_ I have both installed Chrome AND set it as my default browser.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hfs4v9/ubuntu_is_put...
https://x.com/omgubuntu/status/1574759306544701443
I don't need a tv home page.
I own a smart TV that was at least partially subsidized by the mess of ads I see on the home page. But when manufacturers make a high quality panel, I’m not really convinced there’s a market for dumb TVs - people just use their own box if they want, and the marginal cost of the electronics required may even be negative now that Android/Google TV can also handle TV settings while providing a new revenue source.
I've an old dumb 1080p Samsung TV. Apart from the panel not being up to date everything about it is better than the smart version that I bought 8 years later.
The problem (aside from the fact that redoing the firmware isn't trivial - but that's the fun part) is that TVs are big and bulky, and come in multiple sizes and resolutions. And then shipping them around the country gets expensive, limiting reach, and then that means that taking returns also becomes difficult too. Especially because you'd be reboxing existing televisions to begin with. But maybe you could open up a storefront to sell these from and serve a local area first.
Anyway, this is more a comment on the issues with this as bother me, and not an indightment of the whole idea. Someone else with a lot more capital to bootstrap could pull it off - assuming there really is enough of a market for such a product. It might be like the support for a small phone contingent or light truck. There's a vocal crowd that does exist, but they don't exist in great enough quantity relative to the rest of the market, leading to not enough sales to support a business built on that singular premise.
The other issue is HDCP. If the Apple/Google TV won't play high res content to your modified firmware, the idea's dead in the water without an additional device like from hdfury, but at that point, how many customers are just going to put up with a "smart" tv?
Tv boxes have a maybe 3 year lifetime before they get kind of junky. Lcd tvs go at least 5 years, sometimes much longer.
If you have a smart tv, around year 3 or 4, you're going to want to hook up a (new) tv box, but you're still going to have to fight the built in OS anyway, at least a bit.
Economics of ads subsidizing the tv aside, it makes more sense to have the tv firmware be focused on the essentials like responding to user input quickly and if it has a tuner not locking up on poor or malformed signals, and the user can choose between the tv box ecosystems they like.
Separately, it'd be nice if the tv box ecosystem got some more longevity... Maybe that will happen soon. 4k@60fps with dolby vision and/or hdr10+ seems like a likely plateau of streaming video for a while... if they'd start regularly putting in 1g ethernet to handle peak bandwidth of 4k BluRay rips, things would be pretty good. 8k seems unlikely to get mainstream adoption (but I could be wrong)
You can see a similar phenomenon in car media systems, where the solution is an interface (e.g. Android Auto or Apple CarPlay) allowing the vehicle to be "dumber" but more reliable and robust over time. [0]
Televisions can be rescued even more easily, since we already have standards and conventions from the past to use.
[0] For folks unfamiliar with those systems, basically the car's touch-screen becomes an extension of your phone.
We’d all buy it in a blink.
It’s also kinda urgent. I’m clinging onto my 2007 TV because I don’t want a smart TV. Not sure how long it will last.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?q=commercial%20display
Good to see these have added multiple HDMI ports since I last looked.
Here's another Samsung dumb screen, at 55 inches.[2] This is supposed to be for digital signage, but it's really a UHD monitor with HDMI in. But the next size up has "Alexa built in".
Sceptre, which mostly supplies Walmart, has a whole line of dumb TVs, including some big ones.[3] They're a little company in City of Industry, CA, which seems to have found their niche in dumb TVs.
There are lots of "digital signage" displays available. They're usually very bright, reasonably rugged, OK for 24/7 operation, immune to burn-in (they may spend their whole working life displaying mostly the same fast food menu), but not that good
[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-m70d-43-led-4k-uhd-60hz...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08651PB1J
[3] https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U750CV-UMRD-75-4K-UHD-T...
Slow startup, though. Can be like 10-15 seconds.
My cheap smart tv has a youtube app and it's all i need
https://celloelectronics.com/shop-televisions/?filter_produc...
Plus, there is the problem that the vast majority of consumers want smart TVs due to a combination of subsidized lower price and "simplicity" (e.g., they may be worse but they are simpler)
In this vein, I just bought a Hisense QD6 series TV from Costco. I run it in "store" mode connected to a PC and it serves well as just a big, dumb 4K display.
Manufacturers make recurring revenue by invading the privacy of "dumb" users with their "smart" TVs.
It's probably only a matter of time before TV manufacturers establish their own ad networks.
Why? Because they can. They have the ability to fully control *their* "smart TV" (that you paid for) and show you ads that they control --- independent of any programming.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/tcl-tvs-will-use-fil...
GDPR is simply ignored by any bigger US company, it took 5 years for NOYB to facebook get fined which was less than 0.3% of their income, basically a small tax, not a huge fine.
Also GDPR is full of inconsistency (face biometric data is special data, but a photo of your face from what anybody can get the biometric data is not) and loopholes (required by law, legitimate interest).
They did something, but I wouldn't call that "a long way".
I work for a very large US company and can assure you that GDPR is something we pay a lot of attention to. This isn't the opinion of my employer, but my personal experience is that the big players take it seriously and meet and exceed all their obligations because it's too risky not to, and they have the necessary local legal teams to understand the law as best as is possible.
I think it's the small/medium companies who are where most of the issues are. Small companies write a non-legalese privacy policy because they think that's better for their users, but in fact have written something legally meaningless that gives their users no protections. Some small companies just don't know their obligations because they think they won't apply as they're not in the EU.
Then there are the companies who are big enough to know better, but small enough to know they can get away with it because all the scrutiny goes to big tech. I was asked by a medium sized advertising network to implement a keylogger on our website at my previous company so that the network could enforce their revenue sharing by detecting all user data input into our site and match it against their records. I laughed them out of the room, but they made it very clear this was how everyone did it.
To be fair, unless a company has a business presence in the EU there is nobody to sue for GDPR violations. The EU cannot enforce its laws on an entity which isn't under its jurisdiction at all.
The only way the EU could enforce the GDPR on a fully foreign website is to block it.
But it is still true, that nothing happened after the Schrems II judgment, and many-many companies continued to transfer personal data to providers affected by FISA.
GDPR is closely adhered to by big American companies. They may be the only ones to whom the EU is applying regulatory pressure on this. Chinese and Indian companies, on the other hand, as well as any non-enterprise American company, including start-ups, on the other hand, can and do safely ignore it. (Or follow it in broad strokes.)
From my experience working at multiple companies, and having interacted with others, the GDPR is not ignored by American companies. websites based out of the US block EU users to avoid fines, or these US based companies which don't block EU users have gone out of their way to comply with the GDPR as interpreted by their respective legal department.
That's not how tax works. You get taxed on your net, not your gross. 0.3% of gross is massive.
My motorcycle has a rev limiter for a reason. If you let the motor run wide open it will fail catastrophically. Economies are no different.
If you think regulation doesn’t work then you’re simply ignorant of how even basic parts of your daily life work.
It is an interesting metaphor to draw because you didn't need regulation to get a rev limiter.
In the case of my motorcycle the authority is Honda and myself. I can control the constraints but I would never remove them.
It seems like the benefits of constraints on systems would be obvious to engineers but apparently not.
Why spread such untruths?
if you are driving a convertible :)
The more correct term would be Digital Signage displays, eg. [1] - they often run on high voltages though so it's better to be sure when screwing around with them
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/26/why-walmart-bought-vizio
This is why I purchase Vizio instead of other brands. I don't need my television loaded with a ton of apps I'll never use.
This avoided connecting it to wifi, but I still got what I wanted out of it.
They are not all the same --- even within the same manufacturer.
A lot of newer firmwares will launch into setup every time you power up if access is not configured. The TV configuration data is most likely being saved/retrieved from their cloud. This serves as their connectivity test.
Without wifi setup, my new Hisense 4k "budget" model does this *unless* you run it in "store" mode.
Dealing with setup on every power up is possible --- but obviously highly annoying over time --- and this is by design.
The manufacturers desperately want the data collection $. It's the only way some of them make money.
(It kind of implies you need to continue and update, but you can just go to HDMI and it doesn't bother you anymore.)
https://www.tcl.com/us/en/roku-tv/eula
“If you do not agree to this EULA, you do not have the right to use the Television or the Software. If you are within the allowable time period for returns under the applicable return policy, you may return the Television to your seller for a refund, subject to the terms of such return policy. You should perform a factory reset before you return it to erase data that may be stored on the Television.”
That being said, this is the first time I've ever seen an EULA be this brazen and predatory. Claiming that I'm not allowed to use the entire device because I don't agree to some post-sale contract? In writing? Are you sure you want to do that TCL?!?!?
It may depend on your jurisdiction but here in the USA, I'm pretty sure it's legal because they offer a full refund if you chose not to accept.
There are alternative ways to coerce users into playing along. For example, simply store/retrieve TV configuration in the cloud. Without connectivity configured, the TV starts over from scratch in device setup on every power up.
And connectivity obviously opens the possibility for other uses.
They offer you the opportunity to get a refund from the retailer, subject to that retailer's return policies, which may mean "open box" restocking fees, time limitations or similar.
That is not the same thing.
I'm cool with it provided I can use it as a very high quality HDMI display. Then I just got a nicely discounted product.
My worry is if they demand connectivity in order to work as a display. Or worse come with some kind of LTE transceiver to phone home then we're in trouble.
Most will work --- but not always *conveniently*.
On power up, a lot them will launch into setup if connectivity is not configured. Some may actually store/retrieve the TV configuration in their cloud.
So the main concern with keeping it in dumb mode I would think is that they could still snoop in on your streams through the plain old HDMI port.
But if the HDMI is encrypted.....
With their antipiracy standard ....
God that would be amazing.
Also, I'm kind of surprised there isn't a raspberry pi open source project that does what those 20$ Roku fobs do.
Finally ... It kind of shows that hardware hacking is going downhill that there isn't a replacement os for the major brands of smart TVs. It's possible they've locked that down, but also the price points are so low you'd think they don't have the money to keep them out.
So they snoop. There's no value to be had in it if they can't report back to the mother ship. Without a line of communication, the "personalized" ads premise fails.
For now at least this really isn't an issue. If and when these companies ever start requiring a network connection it's a different story.
Unfortunately it is NOT a firewall.
Any device can easily do its own DNS like DoH (dns over https), nnot involve pihole in name lookups, and send package directly to the destination ip address.
There may be other options, I have a friend that 6-10 years ago got a TV, then opened it up and removed a USB stick that implemented all the smart features.
In the context of being a reasonable human going about my business - I wouldn't want one anywhere near me.
It's not that you pay a premium for the bullshit-free version, but rather that you get a discount for buying the bullshit-packed version.
The lower end TVs can barely do the Google TV features, often being flaky. The higher end ones tend to implement the features much better, though not perfectly. My TLC 6xxx series is much less flaky than the 5xxx series, but I do sometimes have to reboot it at the beginning of every watching session, depending on the app.
This is easy: when we buy a smart TV we buy a TV plus a computer. I really would like pay less only for the TV, using the "smartness" of other "computer" (Chromecast, Apple TV, Fire Stick, videogame console, an old computer, etc). If the TV or the computer stopped working, it's just a matter of buying _only_ it.
Until I did some research and found out there is no need to go to this extreme --- at least not yet.
It is possible to buy a "smart" TV at a price subsidized by the privacy of "dumb" users and still run it in a "dumb" display mode.
With the TV I just bought, this is called "store" mode. I use it as a big, dumb 4K display connected to "smarts" that I can control.
A big difference between a "budget" TV and more expensive is brightness and saturation controls are often purposely limited in "budget" models.
So with a "budget" TV, full brightness actually looks more like "normal" on your neighbor's $$ model.
But the public has spoken, again and again, with multiple goods. All that matters is price.
You may be able to sustain business selling very high end stuff for people with means.
But most people, out of greed or need, will go with a low cost option. And that will push nearly everything out in a race to the bottom.
People say that, every time this discussion comes up, but never with any proof.
People buy OLED TVs with four-figure price tags. If those had a "pay $100 more and never see an ad" option, many people would pay for that.
The Kindle e-book reader still has both ad-supported and non-ad-supported models. The non-ad-supported options cost ~$20 (a bit less than 20%) more. Those still sell well enough to be worth selling both models.
All Kindles (except the kids model and the Signature Edition) have ads. Removing ads is basically an IAP which you can pre-buy at order time.
However we don’t know how popular that option is, so it’s not a terribly useful argument. All we do know is it’s not popular enough that they have given up and made them all ad free again.
I'm sitting here looking at a Samsung OLED that has lost bonding on it's panel (horizontal stripes). The result is that that corporation is forever blacklisted.
If there was a larger more vocal market for dumb tvs, they would exist more readily.
The fact that this both exists and is utterly unrealistic in the consumer space just makes it more infuriating.
This is essentially your own preferred solution to a problem that just cost you several hundred dollars when you "had" to replace your 2015 TV
I just never gave it network access and I use it like a dumb TV with a streaming box, so I get to benefit from a price subsidized by the the other 98% of the population who are getting exploited. The whole thing is kinda gross.
It's like there's this enshittification tipping point that you can't come back from. Realistically, who is going to buy a dumb TV at a much higher cost? People who are already savvy enough to get around a smart TV? People who aren't? I don't see it working.
Exactly, that's why all this "I want a dumb TV!" stuff is, well, dumb.
It doesn't cost any less for a mfgr to make a dumb TV, in fact it would cost more. Modern TVs need a lot of computing power to make them work properly, so making the thing connect to the internet and show you ads really costs them nothing for hardware. Then they get to subsidize the TV with all the ad revenue, the kickbacks from the various streaming apps pre-installed, etc. A dumb TV would end up having the exact same hardware and a higher price tag. What kind of idiot would buy that? Not enough to make it worthwhile for the mfgr. If you don't want ads, just don't connect the TV to the internet.
It's a lot like modern Windows laptops that are cheaper than the same laptop with Linux pre-installed. MS and/or the laptop mfgr get a bunch of kickbacks from the crapware vendors to pre-install their crapware, so you end up paying less than you would for having the mfgr pre-install Linux (a free OS).
I’d love a dumb TV, but if you don’t let them online and don’t use built in software it is close enough.
Really - why bother? Can't you feel how it dominates the room? Don't you resent being constantly programmed by a handful of giant companies hiding behind different brands? Not to mention the ads shouting muck into your brain.
The main benefit of a giant HD TV - and please correct me if I'm wrong on this - is that the bigger and brighter the TV, the heavier the mental domination. After a long day/week working, you get to subside into the minima of mental and physical effort.
Relaxation and escapism are valid human pastimes, and we have 'choice' over what to watch to a higher degree than ever before... And it's a golden age for TV in many ways. But I can't help but feel that TV's hooks into people's minds are also more cunning than ever.
There isn't a nice way to say this, but... I can't help but notice that people who watch cable news, for example, become quite predictably wrong on important topics, and get very worked up over whatever the weekly outrage bait is. It's a toxic brew..
And the same goes for all kinds of other 'programming', from reality shows to celeb gossip to sportsball. Doesn't it ever feel like you're being... Subdued? Or even herded?
/smug
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
I want to put youtube channels on it while cooking in the kitchen, or play video games on it. Does anyone actually watch "TV" tv anymore? Isn't it mostly streaming services?
Often a computer game or a TV show.
But I have in mind what I want first, THEN turn it on and do the thing.
I have visited people who like to "have the TV on in the background" for whatever reason and it irks me, I can't stand it.
I removed all of the broadcast channels and it's now an excellent TV. The apps just work, it doesn't show me ads for anything, and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Am I just lucky to have found a good manufacturer?
Pihole, not giving internet (only local network) / and/or only use a trusted device via HDMI to display content.
Regulatory intervention will ultimately make things like PiHole difficult or impossible, while legitimizing "responsible" viewer tracking and mandatory internet connections for TVs.