This will be really interesting to follow. Especially with respect to Tesla’s love of pushing updates to clients. Could this be a harbinger of “you don’t really own your property” by way of so many companies going down this route that enough collapses result in litigation and a massive readjustment? Time will tell.
If the damage is actually as bad as it sounds, Samsung is probably talking with their lawyers and is being instructed to maintain radio silence so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.
Depends, radio silence will cost you money compared to just fixing the problem if that's feasible but it will save you money compared to accidentally admitting to liability in a rushed press release.
Sounds like we need to increase liability for witholding information from customers when that causes damages to make the result of that equation align with consumer interests.
Law is not logical and rarely makes sense. I'm not suggesting at all that they are doing the morally correct thing, but there are a bunch of ways that you can legally admit liability without meaning to.
For example, little life pro-tip, never directly pay for a loan that you aren't liable for. Proxy it through the debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is deceased.
Remember when Crowdstrike crashed half the computers on the planet for a full day? Well, if you do, you're one of the few, because people are still using Crowdstrike, and the stock is still doing well overall.
That's logical reasoning, not corporation reasoning.
Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the customers. They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to care and being responsive results in less of a hit.
Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable - engaging with customers on average costs more than remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a customer runs the risk of them interacting with some threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.
> They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care.
I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.
As soon as there is any hint of a lawsuit, it immediately switches to CYA mode: "don't apologize, don't admit guilt, keep PR on a tight leash with a legal team watching every word and punctuation".
Unfortunately in the US it was discovered that you could do this and now everybody does it. They're called "arbitration clauses" even though their true purpose is to stop you from being able to sue or be part of a class action.
Forced arbitration is just yet another way to limit the consequences of actively hostile business practices. I tend to think of it as the next step after modern customer service: Where modern CS is all about tiring the customer out so they don't have the energy left to raise a proper dispute, arbitration is all about preventing the inevitable occasional actually-motivated customer from receiving the publicity or having the power of a proper lawsuit. It's all about minimizing the voice of the customer, minimizing potential inconvenience for the company, and especially minimizing the company's potential liability. They want to avoid class actions for the exact same reason why Amazon wants to avoid unions, and they want to avoid lawsuits exactly because of their benefit to customers - a potential for lawsuits would wrench away some of the control that companies so enjoy using for their abuse of those customers.
While I understand that not all companies are like this... most are, especially the big ones.
So when I say the "true purpose" is to stop you from being able to sue, I do not mean that it's somehow some closely-held secret that arbitration is an alternative to suing. It's just that the widely perpetuated façade of "oh you just agree to the more convenient arbitration" is a vast oversimplification and there are much deeper and far more malicious intents behind those clauses. It is not at all the win-win that companies would have you believe; I've even unironically seen at least one company say, essentially, "arbitration is much better, and filing a lawsuit is so inconvenient that you wouldn't want to do it anyway". Yeah. It's soo inconvenient for me to cause you so much trouble. For me. Inconvenient for me. It sure is. I'm definitely the one that wouldn't want it to happen. I definitely don't like when companies pay for intentional wrongs directed at me. Definitely not.
I've been wronged by companies a lot through the years and I have exactly zero patience for exactly these kinds of terrible, anti-consumer business practices. Access to arbitration as an option is great; forced arbitration however is a trap designed to protect the company at the expense of the consumer. In other words, forced arbitration has never actually been about arbitration at all, but rather exclusively getting out of lawsuits. That is what "true purpose" means. "Arbitration" is just their "get out of lawsuits free" card; they would use any other card that would have the same effect, because it is that effect that they're after.
A few years ago, some Samsung TVs such as TU8000, had basically a factory defect. Randomly, after a few months, a "line" appears on the TV.
They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).
Yes, outside the warranty.
But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.
Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.
Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"
Also the vendors increasingly push you to put them online to use devices. Samsung tries really hard to make you think that your TV setup needs a mobile app on your phone running in the background with high precision location tracking, and 99.9% of buyers are going to leave that setup so they’re not blamed for problems in the future.
Sometimes I wonder if HN folks are purposefully obtuse or so deep in their bubble that they don't understand how 99% of people think and operate. The average user will always favour convenience over some invisible concept like privacy.
Few things over the past few years have infuriated me as much as tracking and advertising being introduced at the OS level, especially on TVs. I'm looking at you, LG! I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.
The best thing we have been able to come up with is leaving the TV itself disconnected from the WiFi and using an Apple TV for smart features/streaming. I'm sure they're still gathering data but it's at least not as blatant. It's a real crapfest for the consumer at the moment.
> I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like they are few and far between, though.
This just swaps one locked-down company for another. You're still at the mercy of a giant corp, and worse it's unlikely to work well with my linux laptop and Android phone whereas at least Samsung tries (and often fails). A better solution is needed. I buy Sceptre TVs when I can, though for a "big screen" there aren't great options.
Yeah, we do use Apple TV because at the very least if they are collecting our data, they're not using it to advertise directly to us on the same device. My parents have a Roku TV and the number of ads it serves up directly on the device leave me feeling nauseous.
This is sound advice for keeping yourself free from malware as well. Many of these TVs end up running super vulnerable junk that doesn’t get updated and has known exploits.
I’ve had two devices end up with malware like this. A Sony blue ray player that was uploading 2gig a month before I caught it and a Samsung tv.
It’s worth mentioning you have to block or change WiFi credentials. The device with malware may attempt to connect to any known wifi even if you disable it on the device. I get 45000 auth attempts a day from my tv.
You can just use regular math to do this. We've been doing it for 30 years now. You don't need a trumped up overpriced garbage LLM to do anything for you here.
on android you can install SoniControl Firewall to "see" the ultrasonics in your house. Try it with all tvs and things off, then try it with the TV on, youtube videos, and so on.
Pixel tracking works better if the TV is connected to the internet. I remember samsung as one of the companies, where, if your TV was not ever given a wifi connection, it would attempt to connect to any open network to do what it needed to do. This sounds unlawful, so i don't know the veracity, but anyhow - if the TV is online, it can just send a half dozen pixels at known locations back home and there is a database of "content pixels at timestamps" and they match the half dozen pixel values to the database and know what you're watching to some degree of certitude.
but for things like dumb panels older TVs and the like, ultrasonics still work.
> It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
How much benefit could that bring versus burning reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big and powerful but time and time again they keep on forgetting that they can't exist without the users and when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.
It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.
Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.
There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and nearly nobody looks it up anyway.
It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?
> Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."
So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.
And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?
Didn't know that, thanks. Then speakers are actually a pretty big data source. I bet most people don't assume their speakers can be listening. I wonder if you can get internet connection over bluetooth aux or what'd be the best way to get someone to let you send data home on a speaker.
i did some cursory digging, but i don't really want to read the A2DP or AVRCP specifications to see how much data is allowed in the non-audio payload. Besides, PAN exists, but i imagine you have to do something on your phone to allow it.
Most of these expensive things also have wifi, though, don't they?
> Connect your devices and control everything with our soundbar that integrates your favorite voice assistants and smart services like Built-in Alexa², Chromecast³, Airplay 2⁴ and more.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns https://www.ispot.tv/ which is used for ad delivery tracking.
It's much more reliable and precise than the familiar Nielsen ratings: since you know the total audience of X% TV households in a zipcode (which you know demographics of race/income/household size based upon), and Vizio TVs account for Y% of all TVs sold for households with incomes between A and B, and C and D you can get a confidence interval of how many people ACTUALLY saw your TV advertisement.
Samsung was/is probably trying to do something similar: All sound in your TV pipes through their home theater system, so they can "Shazam" whatever media you're watching, regardless of the source (OTT, OTA, hell even YouTube or a Downloaded Torrent on your laptop hooked up via HDMI) and phone home.
If you think about it, keeping them offline is a huge security improvement even without the risk of bricking update, so in ways an automated update regime that convinces you to keep your device offline is giving you peace of mind. In a way.
If it allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary code on a device without the user's consent, it's called an RCE vulnerability. About as serous as software vulnerabilities go, needs to be patched yesterday.
But if it only allows the manufacturer to remotely execute arbitrary code on a device without the user's consent, it's called an automatic software update mechanism and most people somehow consider that it's totally fine.
Ironically the 2022 Samsung soundbar model I have hasn't gotten a single firmware update since January 2023. I bought it new from Samsung after that day.
I am moderately surprised that they even update their firmware on some models.
Two important features I insist on for products I develop:
1. Staged rollout of firmware updates. It’s common practice for apps and software but for some reason it’s less common with firmware. Rolling out to 1% (or less, depending on scale) of devices and waiting a day is cheap insurance. Side note: Build a good relationship with customer service people so you hear about these things immediately.
2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. In conjunction, your automated tests need to confirm that every factory firmware you’ve ever released can update to the latest firmware.
I wonder if that opens a threat vector from a security point of view? If an attacker knows that the golden firmware has some critical vulnerability which they can exploit easily, they can activate it at will by bricking the device and waiting for it to restart.
They could, and that's been a way for attackers to "jailbreak" devices and load custom firmware in the past. Though for the sake of reducing eWaste and enabling device repurposing and reuse, I do think this is the best path for firmware-updatable devices.
The golden firmware should reset to the old/first firmware of the device and nothing else. Keep it as simple as possible and restore the customer device back to an operational state.
The reset would be done physically. If there was some danger of the device being exploited after being reset, advice could be included for those performing the reset to prevent this.
For example, to not connect it to a network and to manually perform an update to the latest version with some physical media.
Attackers aren't usually in a position to reset firmware, and if they are they might as well do a whole host of other things like replace the device with a compromised one. I don't think there is much of a point to trying to protect from that.
Ability to reset to original out of the box firmware is not only about failsafe. It's also a protection from "bug fixes" taking away features you had out of the box.
I'm still pissed off about LG removing record to disk option from our TV after an upgrade. I've only connected it to internet & upgraded assuming some of those bug fixes resolved few dlna issues otherwise it's always on internet block list.
I prefer to keep the factory firmware reset to a manual process that requires user intervention.
For example, holding down the reset button for 10 seconds after plugging the device in.
In my experience, it's not a good idea to have a device automatically roll back firmware and erase user data after failed boots. These mechanisms get triggered too easily during certain power outages (power comes on then goes off just long enough to cause multiple failed boots) or when users are doing simple things like rearranging their power cables.
#2 has been a godsend in the custom/HEDT PC market. Many expensive motherboards now come with a "dual BIOS" system that gives you an older known working image to boot from, in case flashing a new version broke something that can't be easily undone.
Another amazing feature is the ability to flash a BIOS from an unbootable system. You insert a flash drive with the firmware file into a USB port, press a hardware button and the BIOS gets updated, even without a CPU socketed.
This is a requirement for any motherboard I purchase now. I have enjoyed the ability to use AMD CPUs that are slightly outside of the generational support or enable features I am not promised.
Without the ability to flash from USB without a CPU doing this requires keeping spare CPUs that will work just to flash.
You need to have the firmware equivalent of a platform team.
It's common now for medium and large companies to have some variant of a cloud platform team: People responsible for shared practices, infrastructure, and processes in the cloud.
Smart hardware companies have done the same for decades. You have a firmware platform team that handles things like update protocols, recovery protocols, testing checklists, on-device OTA update architecture, and other critical functions.
When you're a company like Samsung that continuously releases and develops products this actually increases your time to market rather than decreasing it. You let each product team focus on the parts of the firmware that make their product valuable and free them from having to roll their own update systems
Samsung has multiple such teams.
In my experience with the broader industry, platform teams are usually less than a dozen people who own millions of lines of mostly-external code. You don't usually get the luxury of careful deliberation and comprehensive testing because you're doing too busy putting out fires and chasing down manufacturer errata.
Samsung might be one of the good ones, but sadly most hardware manufacturers treat firmware and software like just another line item on the BOM. Like a screw or a silicon gasket: Source it from some "supplier," spoon it into the product somewhere on the assembly line, and then never touch it again. I've seen a hardware manufacturer that doesn't even use source control or branching. When they have a new hardware product, they take the software that is closest in functionality, hack it until it works with the new hardware, and then set the software back on the shelf until next time.
It's almost exact same thing as purchasing an insurance.
If the management folks have personal health insurance, surely they must understand the concept and the need. And this is a much better deal because unlike actual insurance this is more like "invest once, enjoy forever" type of thing. And multi-stage boot chain, recovery partition and staged rollouts are not some rocket science that needs some serious expertise.
Yet, here we go. Humans are not really rational actors after all, and collective humans are even less so.
I suppose the closest equivalent would be motherboards with dual BIOS.
There if something goes wrong during an update, you always have a backup BIOS with the previous version (not necessarily factory settings). If the system fails to boot, it automatically switches to the backup BIOS and restores the main BIOS to the last working version.
Great points! As an addendum to this, if #2 becomes untenable for whatever reason (such as a vulnerability in the factory firmware image), then this #3 would be good to strive for as well:
3. have a set of conditions to mark the running firmware image as "safe" and have it become the new fallback firmware image for this scenario. That way you can have a recently up-to-date firmware version constantly trailing the new ones
IMO this is a terrible idea for many reasons but the most important of which is: As a consumer I should have the right to have my device revert any b.s. update and get my setup to how it was the day I bought it.
So many companies have begun rolling out updates that makes the device I purchased call home before allowing any user functions and if/when that server goes down my device becomes a brick. This behavior essentially invalidates my ownership of the product and renders it to a service, provided at will by the manufacturer.
Your idea ensures my device will one day become a brick as soon as the manufacturer decides to mark their update requiring internet check-ins “safe”.
If you think I’m exaggerating check out Louis Rossmann‘s YouTube channel.
FWIW, my background is in B2B hardware and that's the perspective I am coming here with. Out of curiosity though, how do you weigh your value of control vs. security vulnerabilities? Modern speaker systems allow some form of wireless connectivity, so there is bound to be something and not all consumers will be savvy enough to keep up with security updates on their own.
My thoughts on security vulnerabilities is that they exist on any out of date firmware and that should be expected. I’ve never rolled back to factory settings and assumed that this device is now exposable on a DMZ.
Specifically I’m talking about consumer devices, which are almost always behind a NAT config + firewall. If your soundbar has a vulnerability it’s pretty much irrelevant if someone has already breached your network.
If we’re talking about enterprise networking equipment, I still stand by my concerns that the the owner should be able to revert back to stock but the burden of responsibility is on the technician configuring this device, not the manufacturer.
It seems to me the mentality has become that since end users tend to be bad at system administration, they shouldn't be allowed to do it, for their own good.
I reject this mentality. I don't think it's necessary or desirable to make it impossible for people to do things that have negative consequences for themselves. Put a "here there be dragons" warning on the firmware rollback, bootloader unlock, or similar dangerous operation and let people take responsibility for the outcome.
In the case of consumer devices, most people won't even try those things; those who do risk further problems for the chance of a better outcome. In the case of enterprise networking equipment, there's an IT department that, in theory has the skills and resources necessary to make good decisions about technology.
There will always be security issues, so "but security" is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever they want with a thing that they purchased from you (I'm of course just speaking morally/ethically here since there's no legal provisions preventing that in most places).
If I pay you for a product, you have no moral right to tell me what I can and cannot do with that product, up to and including messing with the firmware, installing known-bad firmwares, wiping it and building my own firmware, whatever I want. It's mine, I paid for it, stop violating my private property rights.
I think I agree with you generalle but just from a logics perspective, this is a bad argument:
> There will always be security issues, so "but security" is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever they want with a thing that they purchased from you
Just because there will always be security issues doesn't mean you shouldn't try to take care of the low hanging fruit.
Not the person you replied to, but I'm literally pulling wire again to avoid dealing with that dichotomy. And hardware developers that think OTW firmware updates are a neat idea >:(
Unfortunate you'd need to weave that all the way through the whole product stack in order not to end up in a state that looks like it's working at first glance but actually isn't doing what it is supposed to - like everything running but not showing an image, or everything running except networking is dead (-> also no further updates possible), or (remote) input devices, etc etc
From the manufacturer's point of view, a sufficient "safe" state is "can receive and apply a firmware update" -- worst case scenario you can always push out a new re-signed and renumbered version of the older working version.
Network connectivity would need to be in the set of checks to determine if an update was successful. Also, there should hopefully be QA. If you only have one smoke-test for a firmware image it should be whether or not it can upgrade/downgrade a new image from that one.
The second point is the really important one here. Mistakes happen, having a factory reset that actually works is crucial to avoiding extremely expensive recalls.
I'm reminded of the time a random NPR station accidentally bricked the infotainment systems on thousands of Mazdas and because there was no factory reset feature they had to spend millions replacing head units. That's just bad design.
> A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.
This doesn't work if your threat model includes denying rollbacks to prevent exploiting bugs in old firmware. I'd love to be able to roll-back firmware on some of my devices to allow me to "jailbreak" them using old firmware.
In some cases your newer firmware may be blowing e-fuses that prevent old firmware from functioning. See the Nintendo Switch, for an example.
To be clear: I think this is anti-consumer and wrong, but manufacturers absolutely do it.
Edit: I also think it should be illegal, by way of consumer regulation. I don't think consumers should have option to waive their right to manufacturers not damaging hardware they own.
This doesn't get enough attention, waaaay too many of these issues are traced back to the vendor trying to "prevent" someone from using their product in a way that they don't like.
Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It either performs its well defined functions when you bought it or they sold you a device that doesn’t input/output sound.
Updates for these types of things always fall into three categories. Either they’re gimping some unanticipated usage, they’re trying to insert ads, or they’re trying to gather more usage data.
I actually picked up a Samsung soundbar for my mom this past Christmas and there were quite a few negative reviews. Usually around the soundbar dropping its connection. However diving deeper on them seems to revealed that the issue was resolved with an update. It's not super smart though and needs a USB drive or phone app to update. So it has prevented this situation from happening.
Considering the soundbar connects to a TV, console, phone, etc that are constantly releasing new versions and upgrades it makes sense to build in the function to something as simple as a soundbar to fix bugs and compatibility issues.
Samsung doesn't have the greatest track record with updates though so obviously you don't want to jump the gun on these. Hopefully not a Galaxy Watch 4 situation where they need to be mailed to Samsung to be reset because they didn't think about this during the design phase.
More hardware is sold at cost or at a loss, compensated with ads. I don't like the model either, but that's how it is.
If price isn't the only factor for some, it is for many who would otherwise not buy these things. Sellers picked up on that long ago.
Other comments wish to see regulations, they can't outwit those marketing tricksters. For profit enterprise can, and will offer more alternatives with bigger stamps about privacy, ad-less certified and whatnot.
It’s the norm because people rather buy one single product that does it all.
The alternative to an all-in-one sound bar is having regular 5.1 speakers, a nice receiver, a nice streaming box, and maybe a dumber TV and you will have absolutely the best setup but it’s a lot of putting pieces together, more space usage, and either money (if you want it right away) or a lot of waiting (if you want to get it used).
I had a Yamaha that had a dtsx firmware addition upgrade after it shipped. Not sure if it wasnt ready at product ship, or some way to avoid licensing fees, but I dont know how they would track who upgraded as it wasnt network enabled.
Sennheiser Max has a full computer and os running inside, they can upgrade it quite a bit. Biggest limitation on the device is HDMI 2.0 preventing 20gbps video passthrough of hdmi 2.1, however they should be able to add new audio codecs.
> Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It either performs its well defined functions when you bought it or they sold you a device that doesn’t input/output sound.
Unfortunately there are soooo f..ing many devices out there that don't follow the specs, no wonder given how long and complex alone the Bluetooth specifications are, and HDMI/HDCP (which a soundbar with ARC support needs...) is even worse, and don't even try to get me started on CEC because that is an even bigger pile of dung, or stuff like GPUs that run HDMI over DVI, MHL or USB-C in DP mode and god knows what else people expect to "magically work" with a 5 dollar adapter they got off of Alibaba. And no, "audit products to follow the specs" isn't a foolproof solution either. That means that everyone has to deal with everyone else's quirks and at least the most popular devices and their manufacturers have to supply firmware updates to react upon reports of quirks.
I thought HDMI and DVI use the same signalling (at least the 'digital part' of DVI, was it DVI-D?), just over a different connector?
In my memory only the connectors competed for adoption, and Home Entertainment industry opted for HDMI and the PC-industry opted for DVI, while the signalling was not contested (besides DVI also being able to carry analog signalling with full spin-out, and HDMI carrying audio instead).
My memory might not serve me well here though.
I never thought HDMI would win :( but it makes sense I guess - Computers/their use changed :(
Sibling mentioned CEC fixes— this one is huge. CEC is lovely in concept but I ended up having to disable it completely across my setup as there was just way too many bits of weird behaviour with devices turning themselves on and then switching the TV or AVR to their input apropos of nothing.
I feel like CEC tried way too hard to be magical instead of exposing enough control for the user to be able to block certain commands from problematic devices, or even just designate that device X will always be the boss in a particular setup.
Yup, game consoles are ground zero for this. I hit the button on the PS5 controller only to have the receiver and TV power on, then the PS4 wakes up for some reason and then switches the AVR to its input.
My Sony UHD player also seems to want to grab the input sometimes too, so maybe it's Sony that's the source of the problems haha.
And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should never send power-on messages to its input devices." Because then I would just power on the device I actually want to use, it would turn on the AVR and TV, and we'd be golden.
> And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should never send power-on messages to its input devices."
Yeah, that sounds a weird "feature" in the first place.
If I manually turn on the UHD player/Chromecast/PS5/whatever, it makes sense that the TV also turns on and switches to the respective input.
I could also sort of imagine that if I switched the TV to some input source, it might be convenient if the device connected to that input turns on. (Not by a lot, though. You need the device's remote/gamepad/whatever anyway to tell it what to do, so the one button press saved doesn't really buy you much.)
But what makes no sense for me is the TV turning on all input devices when it's being turned on itself. When would you ever want to have the PS4, the PS5 and the HD player running, let alone as the default behavior?
That sounds like a genuine bug in the TV.
(Also, you sound as if you have some sort of "2 <-> n" setup with n input and 2 output devices. I have no idea how CEC would even be supposed to behave in such a setup. Would an input device turn on both output devices?
I suspect the issue is largely with the receiver (a VSX-935), as that's seemingly the component sending a turn-on signal to its inputs.
If I could, I would have probably run everything to the TV and just done all the audio over eARC, but the TV is on the other end of a 50' HDMI cable, so I definitely need the receiver as an in-rack multiplexer.
I have a laptop, steamdeck, Nintendo Switch and chromecast all connected to an LG TV and all the ouput switching and remote pass-through works as expected. Maybe just a lucky combination ?
Also, time-to-market pressures can result in initial shipments having (minor but not showstopping) firmware bugs. Post-sale firmware upgrades can be beneficial for the customer.
And the obvious solution is to isolate the device from the world. Most of my stereo is isolated from “the world”, and some parts are close to 30 years old. Why does a soundbar need contact with the internet?
Modern soundbar are bugged Bluetooth enabled, also with ship with interfacing protocols, while legacy bluetooth/wifi drivers are ok, protocols just break
Innocuous product features like streaming music, integration with Alexa/Google, connecting to TV and other speakers via wifi. Oh and collecting analytics data and selling to ad networks...
That kinda defeats the point of having a device. Sure it works in some cases but we're talking about a soundbar here and that has to interact with other devices. It's whole purpose is to interact with other devices.
Even if it doesn't need to contact the internet you're still going to want it to connect through cables. There's good reason to connect through bluetooth.
But why should it contact over the internet? Well it sure is nice to be able to stream music from my NAS. There's utility in that. There's also utility in the parent company updating firmware to support new audio codecs. Or to support new algorithms. If my device is gaining more utility, that's a great thing! And of course, if it is connected wirelessly in any way (including bluetooth) I sure as hell would like updates with respect to security.
Without this, the thing becomes e-waste. The environment moves. Time marches on. No thing can exist in isolation, no matter how hard you try. Again, software rots, not because the software changes, but because the world does.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is abuse of that power. It isn't for the benefit of the customer. The problem is managers pushing to release before things are ready. The need for speed with no direction. To not even consider in the calculus of decision making the tremendous costs of when things go wrong. And how this lesson is never learned despite facing the problem time and time again. Issues like this now cost tons of engineering hours, tons of lawyer hours, and ultimately will cost tons in rebates and refunds. How many weeks of work is that equivalent to? Sure, it doesn't always result in catastrophic failure like this, sometimes it results in smaller failures, sometimes small enough they can be brushed off. But those are still costs that no one considers. That's the problem here.
In my case, my stereo is connected to an inexpensive Airplay adapter.
So I do get all the advantages of a connected device, but if the adapter is bricked, I can easily replace just that small device. And more likely, when there’s a new standard, most of my equipment is unaffected.
No, you are missing my point. In the same way as we do (or at least should do) when we develop software, we isolate the volatile parts from the stable ones. The loudspeakers have looked the same for decades. No revolutionary changes in amplifiers in a long time. The same with DACs. That means that when a software update bricks my adapter, or a new much better standard comes along, or I decide to leave the Apple ecosystem, I only need to replace one small part of my stereo system, not all of it.
This should be done internally to the device. I do agree that nothing you do should affect how speaker sure input is processed. But if you want those other features it's much more convenient to integrate them on device or rather place them within the housing as there's lots of empty space.
With electronics you can still isolate functionality like in software how we wrap things into functions. But like software sometimes we need to break that for optimization. Think like Apple M chips. They do it in the most annoying way, but integration is helpful. Ideally in a speaker though you should be able to fuck everything up and still allow for raw input.
As for the Apple thing, well that's a bigger issue because we really should be using open protocols and fuck walled gardens. Walled gardens are part of the problem we're talking about
Sure, you could do everything through a static circuit and require things being fed with speaker wire. But if you add a microcontroller you're going to be able to do much more, get better sound quality, and protect your equipment. Do your speakers have batteries? Do they plug into wall? Either way you can better control power levels. Do you want to boost bass? Fix corrupted signals? Do you want to process signals from anything other than a bare wire?
Sure, you don't need a microcontroller in a speaker. But we also don't need them in our cars. You don't need them in your fucking kettle. But personally, I find them useful and considering how cheap they are it's worth the basically $0 increased price.
See my other argument. The issue isn't that there's a microcontroller in the speaker. The issue is bricking the device. Don't confuse the means in which a bad actor operates with the bad actor themselves. You'll never stop the bad actor by just banning everything tool they abuse. You'll end up with nothing.
Imagine your signal comes in degraded. Some extra noise on the wire because it is passing next to a faulty wire in your walls or something. You can then do a FFT (example) and pull out the noise and rebalance the signal. Maybe an easy way to think of this is with radio since you're very used to dealing with static in that domain but fundamentally there's nothing different than signal coming through a wire other than the technicalities of the medium through which it's transmitted.
There's much more signal processing you can do besides FFT btw and many can improve signal quality and thus sound quality. Even something like a built in equalizer. Sure, you can do this all with hardware by creating all the right filters but you can do more in a smaller package with a computer
At least in theory these Samsung sound bars are supposed to adapt to the listening environment to more accurately render the intended surround sound. They also have various non-trivial inputs (including wireless ones) as well as support for additional real speakers and subwoofers which again might need changes for compatibility.
Of course they could be designed to be simpler and have whatever input device is used (e.g. the TV) handle fancy features like mobile phone support.
While I agree with your broad statement, I have a TCL (with built-in Roku) TV that has a bug in the sound processing. Either it becomes very quiet, drops out completely, or comes in and out with a lot of stuttering. Happens irregularly, typically though not always weeks apart (though on no schedule I've identified), solved with a reboot of the TV (which of course can't just be done by turning it off and back on - you have to select "restart system" from the menus).
I owned it for at least six months before this occurred the first time.
In theory, I could do a USB update of the firmware and hope that fixes it. In practice, they want my serial number to let me download it. No thanks, I'll pass, even though it's never been connected to WiFi or Ethernet and never will be. I'll just reset it every once in a while.
> they want my serial number to let me download it.
Out of curiosity, why is that a problem to you? Granted, it is strange; I went through the process for my TCL Roku who's wifi stopped working (still not fixed, and now a second, 3yo TCL Roku has bricked itself. nice!)
I don't care in principle, but it's not just that. You have to give your serial, you have to boot the TV to the update, which then sends a challenge-response to their servers that must be correctly answered (you use your computer for this, so the TV isn't actually on the internet) for the upgrade to proceed.
I don't know what's in that data. And if I don't know what's in it, I'm not inclined to proceed; you might need my serial number to know if you're giving me the right software, but you don't need challenge/response for that. They sold me a cheap TV in hopes of collecting info on everything I watch, whether via Roku or just screen analysis. No thanks, and I have no interest in making it easier for them to break into my WiFi. I'm sure it would connect itself automatically to an open WiFi.
It's a little paranoid, but they really are out to get us (or at least our data).
A lot of consumer products ship with half-baked software and/or firmware. I wish Polk would fix the bug(s) that cause my soundbar to freeze and need a reboot several times per week. But it's an old product that's not longer sold, so I'm probably SOL.
The problem usually aren't vendors. The problem usually are rightsholders - the movie/TV series industry still didn't get the Spotify memo, and the console game industry... well it's hard to say they don't have a point insisting on serious DRM given how rampant piracy becomes once there's an easy-enough root method available.
IoT integrations like Alexa come with numerous security requirements that are often good ideas in theory but lead to hacky workarounds to meet certification requirements
In what way? Console makers wouldn't gain anything by weakening DRM and making devices rootable. It's not like they are making that much money from device sales.
Of course then you have MS which basically just turned XBox into a cheap but totally locked down gaming PC (since there are very few Xbox exclusives these days).
Spotify made 1 billion $ of profit in 2024. Hard to call that unprofitable.
My point is, it (and Youtube) killed piracy for the most part when it comes to music. Trading CDs full of mp3s used to be a sport in school a decade or two ago, these days why would anyone even want to invest the time when Spotify has everything anyway at a price point school kids can afford it?
Netflix used to become the same thing for movies, but the greed of studios killed it and now it's more expensive to have the large stream services than cable TV.
> the movie/TV series industry still didn't get the Spotify memo
I'm not sure that's really a memo I'd like them to get. We don't need more subscription services where you don't get to own you content and everything can be taken away at any time.
Not always. There's a time and a place for including end users in your threat model. These would include scholastic and carceral settings, where in both cases the end user may, as an example, desire access to resources that have been deemed inappropriate.
I disagree that a software in a school setting should see students as adversaries. Cheating is a much higher level problem that is better dealt with education and negative reinforcement. After all, those students will need to become participants in a society where we definitely don't want this level of mutual distrust around every corner.
But in any case, students are usually NOT the customer here even if they are the end user.
even with that "requirement" add special minimal recovery that can be booted with special buttons sequence by bootloader and allows some form of flashing signed firmware.
this should be especially trivial when your device have some usb ports.
you can keep all requirements of only newer or the same version of firmware to flash, with all refuse checks.
if you mess up, you can allow consumers to flash fix using regular pendrive
Yup! Depends on what's a higher priority: Preventing catastrophic destruction of the device, OR, "protecting" some IP from ultra-small-scale piracy, even though ultimately anyone bent on piracy will be able to pirate anyway.
Clearly the latter is heavily preferred by most companies.
Big part of the UBNT vs Cambium dispute. IIRC UBNT won in court, but just to prevent the Cambium firmware being installed on their hardware the next few firmware versions fixed it so that it cant be easily reverted.
Whats worse is that a lot of the affected hardware was near or EOL anyway, so Cambium was simply helping rescue devices headed for the scrap heap.
Sometimes they do it because it’s contractually required if they want to get access to proprietary standards, for example to allow them to play copy-protected content.
Copyright and patent have morphed into evils that drive anti-consumer and anti-competitive behavior, and have driven a “subscription” model that allows rent seekers to achieve their wildest dreams.
I think the correct way to do this is to allow a rollback to the immediately previous working version. Before updating, write current firmware to failsafe data storage, then do the update. Then a firmware reset sends you back to the last good version. I'm pretty sure this is already done by many hardware and software manufacturers, such as me.
Android systems can do this today. After an orderly shutdown of new software, then it can mark the new stuff as good and not allow older software to boot.
The funny part is the Samsung update that bricked a10 phones was a update to smart things, so it couldn't use the Android A/B capability to roll back lol
Is that applicable here? We're talking about speakers. For most/low security devices, a firmware rollback, or a firmware-download mode, are fine. In this case, it would probably have prevented millions in losses, with the risk being a...jailbroken speaker?
This practice should simply be illegal or at least make the manufacturer liable for a full refund plus interest. We shouldn't let manufacturers brick devices that we own.
Especially if there is an internal testing stage before actually rolling out to production. It's possible that the users seeing the bricked devices are in fact limited to the initial wave, but the damage is already done.
Most companies don't do this because it's not one of their organizational priorities to have reliable updates. The infrastructure is usually custom built and maintained by a couple of folks who have a dozen other responsibilities they're told are more important. Testing is usually limited by hardware availability and release velocity. "One of every board revision we've ever produced" simply isn't available and waiting two days to run through every firmware version before you release updates is a conversational non-starter with the PMs.
There are commercial offerings (like mender.io, never used) that basically specialize in providing rock solid update infrastructure, but that again takes investment and organizational priority that doesn't exist for non-feature code.
Different industry, but I (a long time ago) worked in a place that built scientific instruments.
> "One of every board revision we've ever produced"
The, ah, "special" people we had running engineering didn't even put in the work to be capable of the software querying the board rev. We had to play games like running certain motors past a position limit and seeing if there were limit switches there (or not) to guesstimate board revs.
I'm working on embedded systems and I've seen and heard some horror stories just on the device's side. Piles and piles of pre- and post-reboot shell scripts filled with race conditions against the system's services and themselves. When these break, if you're lucky a factory reset is enough to fix the system, if you're unlucky they become field bricks.
I'm trying to buck the trend though and on the new embedded system I'm working on, I've specifically designed the upgrade system to be as reliable as I can make it. It goes something like this:
- The new firmware is downloaded to the secondary application slot.
- Just prior to rebooting, the entire state data of the system is serialized as a document and stored on a flash partition.
- The upgrade flag is set, the system reboots and MCUboot does its thing.
- The new firmware finds out a upgrade happened, clears out all the data partitions, restores from the document and then clears out its partition.
The system is basically sanitized and restored after each upgrade. It's also the same codepath that handles saving and restoring the system's configuration by the end-user as well as settings management. If the document schema is for an older version, run the N-to-N+1 schema upgraders on it prior to applying instead of trying to patch the system in-place. If something goes horribly wrong, flip a jumper to trigger the heavy-duty sanitization that nukes the entire external flash (internal flash only contains the bootloader, primary application slot and factory parameters so it's essentially read-only once the application boots).
It might be hubris, but I hope it's good enough that I'll never see a bricked card that can't be resurrected by a factory reset with this project (assuming no hardware damage, no internal flash corruption and no bricking firmware getting signed with production keys seeping through the cracks despite all the checks in place).
We already have a watchdog timer. We could automatically trigger a factory reset after N bootloops following an upgrade, but it's up to the end-user to decide to flip the switch so we won't go there.
I kept the summary short and simple, partly because that product isn't out yet and also because I don't want to bury the lead with a lot of extraneous details that we do take into consideration, but are irrelevant to the big picture idea of an upgrade method that factory resets the card and restores its state with a codepath shared with the end-user save/reset and configuration mechanisms.
That's a strong start, but be careful if your system ever evolves beyond a single logical processor. You'll need additional orchestration to have reliable updates in a distributed system with semi-independent processors. The update on one might succeed, while another fails. Depending on when the old images were produced, the new images might not be able to talk to each other. Depending on their relative roles in the system (e.g. one sets up the power supply or network for the other, or acts as the time master to do certificate validation) this may or may not be an easily fixable issue even if each system locally thinks it's okay.
This sort of functional interdependency has become increasingly common in embedded these days with heterogenous SoCs.
One thing I've seen before is to separate downloading from rebooting, broadcast the manifest for the updates between all the independent processors (all updates need a declarative manifest for so, so many reasons) to check locally, and only proceed when they all agree. Rollbacks are initiated if they can't see everyone with their expected versions afterwards.
Fortunately, it's a single no-frills MCU running the Zephyr RTOS. It does communicate with another system, but they are so very loosely coupled to the point that we really don't care whatever is running on the other side.
I won't get into details, but in some of the horrors stories I've heard the distributed system happened to be entirely software in nature. There are plenty of creative ways to mess up an upgrade on a uniprocessor system.
Reverting to factory state seems riskier than last known good state. You could run into things like TLS root authorities not being recognised, deprecated cipher suites, etc. Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.
> > Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.
> That's why I said you have to include this in your test procedures.
You can’t test the world. Even if your servers can correctly respond to requests from old software, it doesn’t mean that the network between you will too.
Networking surely does introduce complications especially when TLS is now basically considered required and cert lifetimes are being limited for 'security' reasons. However most consumer devices have functionality, often their primary/most important function, to which network connectivity isn't even needed. For instance, a speaker producing sounds.
In the factory reset state, things should have a USB flash drive firmware install route which could be used to bring back working root certs, etc.
Of course again this depends on whether the mfg is worried about DRM bypass hacks that are found later on in the factory firmware.
I'd support legislation to issue stiff fines for devices that can't be factory reset at any time, with the only exception being for directly-consumer-benefitting anti-theft (so, iCloud lock is okay).
But can’t you? Sure, factory firmware from many years ago might have issues, but should still work well enough to allow you to fully offline upgrade to a newer working version.
I think all the OP was saying, is: Suppose you’re releasing firmware version N for some widget you make. Now, for all versions V in (0..N-1), verify that applying N to V works correctly.
I get the sense that #2 is viewed as a risk for DRM, given all the work that goes into preventing firmware downgrades to potentially insecure firmware. Specifically thinking of the Nintendo Switch[1] that goes so far as to blow fuses on each firmware upgrade!
eFuses were already on the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. Smartphones also use them to lock out proprietary photography algorithms if you unlock the bootloader.
This is the de facto playbook for one of the Mega-Evil Corp.'s CPE firmware (Gateways, IPTV receivers, etc...).
New firmware is pushed in phases 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% then full scale.
Each stage has some delay incorporated for acquisition/application and then for telemetry (including support contacts from affected accounts) to determine impact and allow for regression fixes.
The other reason they would phase launches is because of firmware builds being used across multiple CPE models and hardware revisions, where only a small subset of hardware could wind up being problematic, but not discovered until deployment.
When you have millions of devices deployed, even a fraction of devices having an issue can create a shit storm on the support side of things.
It all seems so obvious once you know to think about it.
Both are very reasonable features, of course. Here are (some of) the real-world challenges to their implementation:
#1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers' warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed here.
#2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about management above.
Another good one is; please always split any security updates from feature changes (and backport the updates per whatever versioning policy you have for those lagging the latest).
After many years of being burned I always delay system level non-security -related updates at least several days after launch to mitigate the risk.
The important feature here I would insist on is to let the user decide when to do a firmware update. Not the other way round. That's the way to build a good consumer relationship.
Why on earth a sound bar needs to update its firmware? Why firmware needs to be in a couple of tweeters and a woofer? It should basically output audio from an input source.
I completely agree with both points and would add a third: design for offline use first (maybe treat every OTA update as - this might be the final version this device ever receives).
Products should work perfectly fine without an internet connection, heck that's how they worked until 5-7 years ago. Core features should never depend on cloud services, and updates should be opt-in, not forced.
Offline first approach respects user autonomy and creates a natural safety net against bad updates. Plus, it means your product keeps working even when servers change or get shut down years later or a nuclear war happens.
Sure, connectivity has benefits, but a speaker's main job is playing sound, not phoning home. Building offline-first also forces better engineering decisions about longevity and graceful degradation.
It's so hard to find any offline-first apps/devices nowawdays, which is sad to see in a world of algorithms and AI.
But you see, the problem with offline use is the manufacturer can't claw back value in the future. How will you keep shareholders happy if you can't arbitrarily push ads, hobble existing functionality, or impose a new subscription service?
Exactly - that's the flaw in trying to extract infinite growth from finite products. We've turned durable goods into rental services without consent, all to please quarterly earnings reports.
The tragedy is that "respecting customer ownership" is now seen as leaving money on the table rather than building lasting brand loyalty through quality.
> "A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state"
A failsafe firmware reset back to a safe and secure state yes. The factory state is not necessarily that, so no.
I think devices should keep a last known good state firmware but keeping a full factory state immutable firmware would be irresponsible for many usecases.
What hardware reset typically does, in my experience, is to reinstall the last firmware you installed. Many don't even have the space to keep some original and/or safe image in addition. I'm working on one device where we delete much of the existing system to make space for even downloading a new firmware image. It's wild.
iirc for computers doesn't gigabyte have some kind of patent on dual bios design (active vs backup bios chips). I'm sure there are other ways to implement it but I think thats true.
I bet, but I'm talking about devices where the manufacturer tries to shave off every cent to price their products competitively. And then you have big meetings where you have to push back on storage being reduced by a further 2 MiB. At least that's something I've seen working in the embedded space. Storing an additional firmware image, be it only a few megabytes, is unfortunately often off the table there.
As a user/customer, if I'm part of that 1% with an issue and get the same sort of "canned" response you see on the mentioned thread, I feel like me as a user doesn't matter. I guess the next step is calling customer support and then having the person on the phone making me go through their checklist of things I've already tried and again, feeling like this is of no use.
I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies to actually "hear" their users.
For this $1500 street price soundbar, I'm wondering whether they consciously decided not to invest in BOM cost or software effort that would help avoid bricking.
I'm not sure I understand various industries' conventions...
While interviewing for a principal engineer job, I was meeting individually with a bunch of team leads and managers, and one engineer asked how would I design firmware updating for the company's product (which was more critical, complex, and expensive than a soundbar).
I assumed they were probably trying to see whether I would throw in some robustness/resilience (not oversimplify it). So I sketched it out, while hitting notes like diffs, downloading and assembling in staging space, imperfect networking, having at least two firmware "slots", backing out upon boot loop or failure soon after boot, gradual deployment to installed base, contrasting with some less-critical consumer product firmware update practices, etc.
(Either that was a bad answer, or they got distracted thinking about something I'd said, because I was getting odd subconscious backchannel cues, and they were unresponsive when I tried elicit more requirements or guidance about what they were looking for. Maybe there was some standard embedded systems programmer canned answer that I was supposed to recite (analogous to the Web brogrammer 'system design' interview), and they couldn't think of how to nudge me towards the shibboleth without saying it?)
> A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.
Or perhaps to the very first released firmware version. This way they don't have to support updating from any version to the latest, just from the first one.
> 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.
Do you mean like a physical button? That could work, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it. Holding down power for 10 seconds (or whatever) usually just erases user data, but doesn't reset firmware. Are you aware of any device that does this? But does it require some meta-firmware to roll back the firmware? What if that meta-firmware has a security flaw and needs to be updated? And that update is faulty?
If you're talking about a code sent from your servers to devices to reset, that seems like asking for the impossible. If a firmware update bricks the device, that may very well brick its ability to receive codes at all.
In both situations, it starts to feel like a problem of infinite regress...
> 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort.
That's a nifty mechanism that also allows downgrade attacks, so it has cybersecurity implications that may or may not be acceptable. Furthermore, it might not be practical or even be possible to restore the system to factory condition due to technical reasons.
The team next door allows its systems to downgrade to a previous minor version with a mandatory factory reset. It however refuses downgrading to a previous major version because it implies the bootloader was upgraded or the storage was repartitioned and they really don't want to rollback that.
Except when it comes to firmware, downgrade "attacks" are not attacks at all but just owners making use of THEIR devices. The real attack is the company trying to retain control over something they have sold.
This is one of the reasons why my home theater system is built from discrete parts (not an all-in-one soundbar), with a high quality receiver that never talks to the internet, doesn't have an ethernet cable and has no wifi access (it works fine as a bluetooth sink when I want to play something from my phone into it), separately purchased 5.1 speaker system, and roll of 16awg stranded copper speaker cable from monoprice.
- If a firmware can be updated, it must keep a minimum ROM feature so it can be recovered.
- No device should be updated without the *owner* explicit intention to do so.
- Full docs must be released if the vendor stops supporting it.
- if the manufacturer retains some form of ownership after "sale", it is obligated to provide free repairs/replacements for the duration of the contract
> No device should be updated without the *owner* explicit intention to do so.
That point has practical issues, because most consumer electronic customers are technically dumb.
Consequently, you end up with a long-tail of deployed device firmware versions, which makes support a nightmare (fix this external integration that broke... across 20 different versions).
I'd phrase it more in terms of:
- Every device must include an option for owners to disable automatic firmware updates.
Customers will gladly use an outdated browser or OS with known exploits to access their most sensitive information. Automated updates are necessary evil. Even a smart speaker with a vulnerability could end up as part of a botnet.
I can only assume you’ve never worked in desktop support if you think that is something the general populace is remotely interested in. Smartphones are a step in the right direction for the tech illiterate and uninterested. There is zero reason to give lay users enough rope to hang themselves with despite that being the opposite of what I or most users of this site would like for ourselves.
I actually did work with customer support in my very first job :) We had a limited IT crew, so programmers on-site would often go to the users' office to help with software and hardware issues.
My anecdote is the opposed of yours: they were interested in knowing why something wasn't working, but only as long as you're willing to be patient, talk slowly, and explain any unknown concepts to them, if required.
Insulting them, or just telling them it's their fault something wasn't working would be a sure way to get a negative reaction instead.
Fair enough. Many of my end users were indeed eager or at least willing to learn as you say. A non-insignificant portion were not though, and those are the ones I'm speaking of. But that was also a professional environment. Your interested users had some obligation to the company and the support of professionals like yourself to guide them.
Additionally, I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not demeaning them. They simply do not care to know and that's perfectly fine. I wouldn't demean someone for not understanding how their car works, or even failing to get their oil changed. The computer is a tool to file taxes and shop on amazon for most people, they have a million other priorities in their lives that come before making sure windows is up to date, let alone actually considering its security. It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.
> I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not demeaning them.
Sorry if it sounded like I was implying you thought that, or called them stupid, I didn't mean it that way. That statement wasn't trying to 'refute' anything you said either - it was just expanding on my anecdote of what I saw that it worked or not, whether in a professional environment or somewhere else.
Now, replying to your recent post,
> It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.
I think we just hard disagree here. I believe ultimately the user is/should be on control of how their own computer is used.
No worries, I agree with you in principle and for my own usage but, in practice I don’t want my grandma to have to think about security at all and I’d prefer if there were very few ways she could be social engineered to circumvent what security is there.
Beyond that I think total control can still be achieved in the realm of hobbyists who can run Linux or flash alternative firmwares etc.
I think this is completely rational given a realistic threat model. As a customer, I've had my browser hacked exactly never, but examples of feature downgrades from vendors abound. Vendors are a much more serious attack vector than a random hacker.
I would assume your browser automatically applies security updates in the case of 0day exploits, no?
Like I said, automatic updates are an evil. But the general populace will absolutely defer every security update until the end of time so long as they don't have to spend five minutes waiting to get to their desktop.
Obviously vendors enshitify their products via firmware updates and potentially brick devices or introduce new vulnerabilities but, it's ludicrous to pretend that the general populace are good stewards of their internet connected devices or that they ever will be. They simply do not care, they never will, and its up to the rest of us to design products for the lowest common denominator if we want protect end users and have a safer internet.
Also the number of times I want my speaker or TV to go online is zero, while Samsung apparently wants that number to be greater than zero for both products. So it is frequently the companies that put us in this situation in the first place.
In EU, Cyber Resilience Act requires automatic updates, so the second point is moot.
Most owners want just plug and play, so it makes sense.
Even third point is pretty moot. We don't do that for hardware, why for software... A component is no longer manufactured? Tough luck, hopefully you stockpiled it.
A law? As an engineer, I really don’t want a bunch of technologically-inept congressmen telling me how I have to build software, firmware, or hardware.
As an engineer you should be familiar with laws and regulations. Try creating health care software without regarding HIPAA, for example, should make for lots of fun and lawsuits!
As if engineers actually get to make decisions about software, firmware, or hardware. Ha! That is truly hilarious.
I would rather have a bunch of mildly responsive legislators setting the boundaries of what is acceptable than a bunch of middle-managers trying to justify their salary to their private equity overlords.
As an end user I don’t really care what you want. I want the thing I paid money for to keep working after you’ve disappeared. Otherwise, in my estimation you’ve stolen from me.
Construction, hardware, radiation, dam and wastewater engineers are highly regulated professions. Do you take responsibility for bugs in your technology? Do you have insurance for your mistakes in professional work? Are you an engineer or a coder? Are you certified to do your job or just passed a boot camp?
I loved my Sonos soundbar. It sounded amazing. But it required me to use their terrible app. That's why I got rid of it (the app was REALLY bad!) - luckily, before they started bricking customers' devices.
Samsung sucks. Their customer support is a joke. And this is across the world. Right now I am back in Brazil, just got a new samsung product. It was delivered non-functioning. Hours since I submitted a ticket. No answer. Talking to a real human being is impossible.
It seems that way. The camera on the S24U seems to be a decent piece of engineering which is totally hosed by awful software and a sensor that can't be accessed at full res by third party apps.
My Samsung TV got more and more unusable with every update. Over the years, saved apps, like Youtube, started to disappear every time it woke up. Then it would default to their Samsung TV app, rather than your last app. Samsung TV app happened to be on the Baywatch channel every time my young children started the stupid thing. Finally, after it took 2 minutes to load the youtube app, I factory-reset the device, disconnected the internet from it, and put a Beelink mini PC in front of it. Works flawlessly.
Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned obsolescence.
I have a similar experience with my high-end Samsung TV from 2013. The TV itself still works perfectly so I'm not replacing it soon (still 1080p, not 4K, but...), but over time, Samsung has steadily removed key features with each update. When I first bought it, it supported Skype video calls (and now the integrated webcam can't be used at all), IPTV streaming, and various third-party apps — all of which are now gone.
But you can at least for now still use those "smart" TVs as dumb displays for whatever device you want and just ignore the fact that the TV is running a full android stack or similar. There really is no need to scrounge for older devices with inferior display tech.
This is exactly why "Smart" TVs don't make any sense. My in-laws have a perfectly fine Sony TV, it's nok 4K, but the HD picture quality is amazing still. Apps have slowly started to disappear as they are no longer being updated and new one aren't being added.
I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't get updated applications.
Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product that is support for a decade.
100%. I think most people should probably transition their thinking from using smart TV apps being an obvious or reasonable thing to do, to viewing them like the ads you sometimes find in the box when you buy something. They’re basically just ads for streaming services, and they’re mainly there to try to trick you into connecting the TV to the Internet so that it can gather data for them.
In the event that one wants the app functionality, they’ll always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC’s are weaker than what you find in that $40 “Chromecast with Google TV.” so they’re pretty horrible to use even while they are current and supported.
LGs, while still smart TVs, are relatively competent at being dumb TVs. Your only other options these days (sans rescuing a dumb TV from e-waste) are commercial panels and projectors.
If you just use an HDMI input and attach some streaming box to it, Samsung TVs work just fine. Just never touch the remote and only interact with the source and everything works.
My experience with LG wasnt any better. Thorough about a year the tv became increasingly unresponsive. You start it, after 30 seconds the sound andpicture appeared, and for about 2 full minutes it would not react to inputs what so ever (except turning off). So if you happen to turn the tv off with higher volume, you could not launch it in the evening without it blasting for 2+ minutes at night. Abhorent
Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung.
Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices.
Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.
I hate this idea that software "rots" all by itself when it's just left on a device and is impossible to keep working. I would at the very, very least expect my device to work exactly as it did on day one, for the next 50 years, assuming I don't change the software. It's bits on a flash drive! It doesn't rot, outside some freak cosmic ray from space flipping a bit.
If you're saying the software stops working because the backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a proper versioning system and do not touch the backend service, and it also should work forever.
So don't burn CA pubkeys into your binaries without means for user override. If the software can persist a user-specific analytics ID it can support user certs. This is a solved problem.
Yeah but how many people would do that? You, me, and maybe thousand other people here and similarly minded. That's sadly fart in the wind for such companies and not worth creating more friction and risk (ie folks hack their under-warranty tvs till they stop working and then come back asking for free replacements and tarnishing the brand).
I wish there was some trivial real-life applicable solution to this that big companies would be motivated to follow, but I don't see it. Asking for most users to be tinkering techies or outright hackers ain't realistic, many people these days often don't accept basic aspects of reality if it doesn't suit their current comfy view, don't expect much.
Here in South Korea, everyone who uses online banking has to renew and reissue banking certificates every year. While I'm not convinced the certificate process is 100% safe, using certificates is one good concept in the sh*t show of Korean online "security" malware users are required to install.
You can add as many user-defined, custom trust anchors as you want, they’re not going to make an expired server TLS certificate work.
Don’t get me wrong, allowing users to add their own trust anchors is absolutely a good thing. But it wouldn’t change anything if the vendor did what GP suggested, which is that the vendor "[does] not touch the backend service." Because one day, their TLS certificate would expire, and they would technically no longer be able to deliver security updates even if the user wanted them.
I think there is a strong argument to simply not checking certificate expiry dates in embedded hardware.
Just keep using the expired certificate forever.
Sure - that means if someone leaks the private key that everyone worldwide needs to do a firmware update to get security.
But that's probably less user harm than everyone worldwide needing to do a firmware update to replace an expired cert, and having a dead device otherwise.
At the very least the user should be able to override the failing certificate check. So much "security" cargo culting is intentionally planned failure.
1) You can't pass a PCI-DSS audit if you have expired certificates.
2) You can't always tell the CDN providers what to do with certs.
3) We've seen examples of new root certificates that mean devices don't know about things like LetsEncrypt
Not my problem as a buyer. Build the infrastructure to make certificates and everything else work for a reasonably long time. Service is part of the contract.
Mentioning that certificates expire was directed against GP’s unreasonable demand that the vendor "do not touch the backend service." This doesn’t have to do anything with the buyer.
That's the point, there are no substantive contracts between you and the OS. If we want apps to be responsible for root certs that's interesting, but then the app needs some roof of trust with the OS anyway.
I certainly hate that idea as well, but I also accept a pretty decent amount of that because of interactions with the greater world outside of one company’s direct control.
For instance, suppose a streaming service starts requiring a new login method. They have to update their apps to use this new API. If there are and have been over a dozen different distinct smart television operating systems in the past 15 years, and there will be a dozen more in the next 15 years, it’s unreasonable to expect that even companies the size of say, Netflix, are going to reach far enough back in their history to update all those apps. They probably don’t have developers who understand those systems anymore.
And also, the software distribution mechanisms for each of those platforms are probably no longer intact either in order to receive an update. While it’s true that my Panasonic Blu-ray player that I bought in 2009 is still perfectly functional, and has a Netflix app, I assume it doesn’t work and that Panasonic would be hard pressed to distribute me a working updated app.
The only way things would be much different would be if technology progressed at a far slower pace, so there had been no need to adopt any breaking changes to how the app is built, how the apps and firmware was distributed, etc.
There are several examples I've seen of firmware on devices failing because of bit rot, so that's not true. We used to design devices so that the bootloader was pulled from NOR instead of NAND because of this. Then the device could be recovered using a USB stick.
Most people don't encounter it because their device was updated at least once. People should be less trusting in flash drives than they are, I recently pulled three USB flash sticks out of storage and two of the three are now unhappy.
There's a strong argument that consumer electronics should be able to be more incrementally upgraded. Including things like baseline upgrades for certificates. One of the things about TVs and these systems is that they are usually running on something like OverlayFS to avoid corruption of the base OS and enhancing security/integrity. They focus on replacing the underlying image, which is often security signed as well. If you screw something up with a device that's in a customers home then you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing it, the manufacturers have their war stories in this regard, so they're very risk adverse.
As for freezing the backend, you can't. Your API will evolve and for example if your database changes then your backend services will need to be touched. That database will change, some metadata or label will need to change. Even if you keep the API the same you'll need to maintain the legacy backend. Then you need that service running, consuming compute, for years even if there's hardly anyone using it and it's costing money. Then you need security patches for the backend service because the framework needs upgrading or the OS needs upgrading. Eventually the backend framework will be EoL/EoS and so you need to spend to upgrade. It's like saying we'll keep a Java backend running on a public facing API well beyond it's life, log4j anyone?
what bother's me even more is that they are constantly spying on me (phone home, what am I watching, ...) and pushing advertisements to my TV. My next TV will probably not be connected to the internet.
Still appreciating my 2011 high end Samsung TV. I believe it's the last non-smart product year. It could stream videos from a network share but that's about it.
Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.
It's kinda common knowledge at this point that almost all Smart TV's suck, especially Samsung. I went the Samsung route as well - the TV itself is fine, but the software is horrible.
The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.
> The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.
Or just connect the TV to your PC where you have the freedom to run whatever software you want. Why replace one crappy "smart" device with another.
I pulled my Samsung Smart TV off the network a while ago, precisely because it was getting slower and slower over time. The allegations of spying pushed me over, but the apparent belief that they own my TV would also have done it.
I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded.
Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable.
My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.
I had a smart TV that gradually got slower and slower until it became basically useless. I figured it was just running out of RAM as apps got larger with updates over the years.
We bought a samsung tv in 2016 and it slowly became unusable by mid-2020. Fortunately it got dropped by the movers and we were able to justify buying a new TV (LG). The LG UI/UX is awful though, I wish we'd bought a sony. LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price.
I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).
> LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price.
Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV. Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner and hooking that up to the A/V receiver.
Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use to control them if for some reason you don't want to use their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to it from a computer or mobile device.
They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets the current volume setting of mine:
I had a Samsung QLED TV, and still had to upgrade the firmware once. Thankfully you can do this by USB storage without connecting the TV to the Internet. The preloaded firmware had audio issues where sound would drop out, even when playing through the built-in speakers, and I haven't seen that issue happen since upgrading the firmware.
I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field.
TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet.
They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV?
Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.
After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made.
For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products.
And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.
Yeah, but is there a way for consumers to compare the compute performance of any given TV?
If OEMs differentiated their TVs based on compute performance, consumers might be able to make an informed choice. (See smartphones: consumers expect a Galaxy Sxx to have faster compute than a Galaxy Axx.)
If not, consumers just see TVs with similar specs at different prices, so of course they’re going to pick the cheaper one.
It's really hard to get these things across to consumers.
This is why we ended up with phrases like "Full HD".
The average consumer doesn't know what these numbers mean, people who read hackernews aren't the 99%. Phones have helped a little bit with widening the idea of newer = better, but ask the average person how many cores their phone is or how much RAM it has? They don't know.
Also, it's hard to benchmark TV performance as a selling point. Perhaps sites like rtings need to have UX benchmarks as well? They could measure channel change times, app load times, etc. That might create some pressure to compete.
Thanks for sharing. Without insight beyond being a consumer, I do think there's room for disription (ideally from within the industry itself) vs 10y ago.
Comparing models from 2005/2015/2025, for example. Most people literally can't tell 4k from 1080 and anything new in the HD race mostly feels like a scam. The software capabilities are all there. I think to differentiate from the no-name stuff, longevity is going to become a more significant differentiator.
We tried to disrupt the market, back about 10 years ago.
One of the significant problems is that 80% of TV SOCs are made by one company, MStar (or their subsidiary). And there's only a handful of companies who make the motherboards with those chipsets. Anyone entering the market either buys those or isn't competitive. It's hard to be competitive because everything is so concentrated and consolidated. Since ST Microelectronics and Broadcom left the TV chip market it became a much less diverse market.
We were an established company who made software for STBs, we had done a ground-up build of what was probably the most capable and powerful framework for TV/DVRs. The new design was commissioned from us by a well known open source Linux distro, who then decided they didn't want to continue with the project after they realised that getting into TV OS's was hard. We then took on ownership of that project but getting investment or even commitments from buyers was impossible.
The retailers and TV brands wanted to rehash the same thing over and over because that was tried and tested. It didn't matter that we made something that was provably better and used modern approaches, it wasn't worth the effort for them. If you can't order about 500,000 TVs then you're not going to get anyone to make anything custom for you these days and you'll not make a profit.
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It was a DVR/TV framework that was designed by people who had worked for big names in the TV business with a clean slate. It would handle up to 16 different broadcast networks (e.g. satellite, terrestrial, cable) and up to 255 tuners, even hot pluggable. Fast EPG processing and smart recording to either internal storage or USB storage. It was user friendly and allowed for HTML5 apps. We pushed it as much as we could but eventually on the brink of financial ruin the company was sold to someone who had no interest in what had been built. I will always feel that something great was lost.
But then they're running on the same common platform as the models half the price. But more than 95% of the cost of the TV is in the panel itself, a fancy model is usually just a bigger model and maybe some different, higher end panel. But the CPU inside is nothing special because then they can keep costs down to compete the with the cheap 60in TV you saw while shopping for groceries.
>I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal.
You are literally the first person I have ever seen say this online, besides myself. I have worked in hardware for years and can vouch that there is no such thing as planned obsolescence, but obsession over cost is paramount. People think LED bulbs fail because they are engineered that way, but really it's because they just buy whatever is cheapest. You cannot even really support a decent mid-grade market because it just gets eviscerated by low cost competitors.
> TVs are a wildly unprofitable business... not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core
Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?
I really want to highlight how ludicrous the difference is: My $4,000 "flagship" OLED TV has a 1080p SDR GUI that has multi-second pauses and stutters at all times but "somehow" Apple can show me a silky smooth 4K GUI in 10 bit HDR.
This is dumbass hardware-manufacturer thinking of "We saved 5c! Yay!" Of course, now every customer paying thousands is pissed and doesn't trust the vendor.
This is also why the TVs go obsolete in a matter of months, because the manufacturers are putting out a firehose of crap that rots on the shelves in months.
Apple TV hasn't had a refresh in years and people are still buying it at full retail price.
I do. Not. Trust. TV vendors. None of them. I trust Apple. I will spend thousands more with Apple on phones, laptops, speakers, or whatever they will make because of precisely this self-defeating decisions from traditional hardware vendors.
I really want to grab one of these CEOs by the lapels and scream in their face for a little while: "JUST COPY APPLE!"
> Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?
This is the result of Apple being vertically integrated and reusing components from other product lines in products like Apple TV. The SoC used in the Apple TV are from lower-tier bins of chips produced for mobile applications.
With the Apple TV, you are getting a SoC that is effectively the same as a recent-year iPhone. With most other Smart TV devices you are getting a low computational power SoC, Raspberry Pi tier, with processing blocks that are optimized for the video playback and visual processing use cases.
Apple also does this with the iPhone where the non-flagship variants will reuse components or designs from prior years.
Television/Smart TV manufacturer margins are in the single-digit percentages and the Samsung and LG tv businesses are significantly threatened since their high-volume products have been commoditized from Chinese producer competition. Most potential customers are shopping based on screen size per dollar, versus specs like peak luminance and contrast ratios. Flagship TV products like "The Wall" are low-volume halo products. Lifestyle products like "The Frame" exist because they are able to differentiate to certain segments of customers that place enough value the packaging aesthetics to buy a higher priced product with better margins for the manufacturers.
Most other hardware device manufacturers are jealous of Apple's margins. Nvidia would probably be one of the few exceptions.
Thin margins on commodity tier products drive these manufacturers to cut their BOM costs as much as possible, even if it makes the product worse in other ways. This is also the big driver for why ads are appearing as part of the Smart TV experience at the device/screen level. Vizio for example shared that they made more money from their ACR business than they did from the device sales themselves. There are companies with business models based around giving you the screen for "free" in exchange for permanent ad-space. Even adjacent products and companies like Roku have business models where they are selling their hardware at near break-even cost points because their business model is built around 'services' from having a large user audience.
In theory they do have access and should, but in practice they don't.
Samsung's flagship mobile phone products tend to ship with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in competitive markets, such as USA/North America, versus their "in-house" Exnyos SoC used in markets where consumers tend to have less choice (e.g. Samsung S-series phones with Snapdragon for USA, Exnyos for EU and KDM markets)
Greater than 95% of the cost of a TV is in the panel.
TV panels must have a near 0% defect rate and a single piece of dust during the manufacture will render the finished panel e-waste. The bigger the panel the risk of a defect goes up exponentially because the surface area for any defect becomes bigger. It follows the same issue as to why chip companies introduced chiplets, the smaller die sizes improves the yield and they can throw away less silicon.
A TV panel is basically a 50in chip, and a mobile phone display is a 6in chip.
This describes essentially all Samsung products: really cool for the first few months then progressively accelerating slide straight into the trash.
I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client.
Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.
Yep, I stopped using Samsung products not too long ago.
Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last year’s model—which I had just purchased—so we could test with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting that platform.
Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the quote though.
I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in the fucking source switcher. Absolute total disregard for their users.
LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.
Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.
Contrary to lots of other opinions here, I bought a 65" Samsung TV at the beginning of covid and I sincerely don't have any significant complaints. The remote is easy to use, launching apps is straightforward, connecting an ARC soundbar was no problem, nor was connecting a Chromecast and an Xbox, and it "just works". Every once in a blue moon (maybe twice a year-ish) I've had to power cycle it to fix a wifi connectivity issue, which may well just be a result of DHCP lease expiration on my network.
I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan.
All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues.
We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.
That's what all Samsung televisions do, and there is no way to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for targeted advertising.
This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots at regular intervals and upload them to very insecure hosting.
I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!
It's called automatic content recognition (ACR). Most systems take low resolution (about 640x480 or 320x240) black and white screenshots at regular intervals, compress them do death, and upload that to big brother. That's more than enough to determine what specific kink or style of porn you're into, if you make the mistake of thinking that watching that kind of stuff in the privacy of your own home is private.
I don't really care because I only use the TV to access other streaming apps, and I know they already see everything I watch anyway. I don't have either cable TV or a cable-like alternative (YTTV, Roku Live, Sling, etc). Periodically I'll use it to cast something to, but it's usually my kid's soccer matches from a website on a laptop.
Fwiw, to the best of my awareness, I don't receive any advertising from my Samsung TV other than perhaps the strip of suggested things to watch (half of which are "continue watching" linked to watch history in the app I'm hovering over) that lives above the app list. This is wildly different from Google TV, which has a core value prop of embedding advertising right in your face.
I had a similarly negative experience, sadly. Samsung managed to break HDMI-CEC in the final firmware update for one of their tvs, and wouldn't allow downgrading.
Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...
I will never understand why people are willing to connect so many of their devices to the internet for minimal features. I went out of my way to build a network that prevents even the things I want to have local wifi access from being accessible to the internet.
Yeah like these "cheap" HP printers, which have to be connected to the internet so that they can force you into a subscription, use their own inks only etc. They do not belong to you either.
The question is if it still works "enough" to update to a working firmware, or if it's so broken that it can only be fixed by flashing the EEPROM directly.
True, that would be preferable, but alas Samsung is bent on making their products as big of a pain in the arse as possible.
At least with my Samsung soundbar, the remote can change the volume, the subwoofer volume and change between modes (standard, surround, game). But if I want to enable night mode, I have to use the SmartThings app. There's no way to enable it using the remote. What's worse, the app often hangs when connecting to the soundbar, requiring me to force stop and restart it. So sometimes toggling a feature that should be a single button on the remote takes me over a minute.
Samsung is right next to HP on my list of brands I will never ever buy in my entire life.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadFor example, little life pro-tip, never directly pay for a loan that you aren't liable for. Proxy it through the debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is deceased.
Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the customers. They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to care and being responsive results in less of a hit.
Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable - engaging with customers on average costs more than remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a customer runs the risk of them interacting with some threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.
I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.
It’s not a secret that arbitration agreements are intended to force the parties to arbitrate their disputes.
While I understand that not all companies are like this... most are, especially the big ones.
So when I say the "true purpose" is to stop you from being able to sue, I do not mean that it's somehow some closely-held secret that arbitration is an alternative to suing. It's just that the widely perpetuated façade of "oh you just agree to the more convenient arbitration" is a vast oversimplification and there are much deeper and far more malicious intents behind those clauses. It is not at all the win-win that companies would have you believe; I've even unironically seen at least one company say, essentially, "arbitration is much better, and filing a lawsuit is so inconvenient that you wouldn't want to do it anyway". Yeah. It's soo inconvenient for me to cause you so much trouble. For me. Inconvenient for me. It sure is. I'm definitely the one that wouldn't want it to happen. I definitely don't like when companies pay for intentional wrongs directed at me. Definitely not.
I've been wronged by companies a lot through the years and I have exactly zero patience for exactly these kinds of terrible, anti-consumer business practices. Access to arbitration as an option is great; forced arbitration however is a trap designed to protect the company at the expense of the consumer. In other words, forced arbitration has never actually been about arbitration at all, but rather exclusively getting out of lawsuits. That is what "true purpose" means. "Arbitration" is just their "get out of lawsuits free" card; they would use any other card that would have the same effect, because it is that effect that they're after.
I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded into mandatory arbitration.
They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).
Yes, outside the warranty.
But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.
Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.
Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"
Most people aren't techies. They buy the thing, and use it as instructed.
The best thing we have been able to come up with is leaving the TV itself disconnected from the WiFi and using an Apple TV for smart features/streaming. I'm sure they're still gathering data but it's at least not as blatant. It's a real crapfest for the consumer at the moment.
Plug in an Apple TV?
I’ve had two devices end up with malware like this. A Sony blue ray player that was uploading 2gig a month before I caught it and a Samsung tv.
It’s worth mentioning you have to block or change WiFi credentials. The device with malware may attempt to connect to any known wifi even if you disable it on the device. I get 45000 auth attempts a day from my tv.
You can just use regular math to do this. We've been doing it for 30 years now. You don't need a trumped up overpriced garbage LLM to do anything for you here.
Pixel tracking works better if the TV is connected to the internet. I remember samsung as one of the companies, where, if your TV was not ever given a wifi connection, it would attempt to connect to any open network to do what it needed to do. This sounds unlawful, so i don't know the veracity, but anyhow - if the TV is online, it can just send a half dozen pixels at known locations back home and there is a database of "content pixels at timestamps" and they match the half dozen pixel values to the database and know what you're watching to some degree of certitude.
but for things like dumb panels older TVs and the like, ultrasonics still work.
To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices) associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's Samsung - they literally do this:
https://entertainment.ie/trending/yes-your-samsung-smart-tv-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/samsungs-warning-our-smart...
It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely, worked in media advertising.
Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my opinion, the best in the space.
Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony, Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki, Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi, Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and Regal.
[1] https://ispot.tv/
[2] https://www.samba.tv/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_TV#Customers
It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying away is completely insignificant when they consider the profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
> Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is activated because a microphone icon appears on the screen."
So it is not like it was listening without your knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the data being sent over. Like with every other online service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a bullshit reason to hate them.
And why provide two links basically saying the same about the same story?
Most of these expensive things also have wifi, though, don't they?
> Connect your devices and control everything with our soundbar that integrates your favorite voice assistants and smart services like Built-in Alexa², Chromecast³, Airplay 2⁴ and more.
> 802.11ac
https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/home-the...
yeah, they have wifi, so they don't even need bluetooth hacks.
It's much more reliable and precise than the familiar Nielsen ratings: since you know the total audience of X% TV households in a zipcode (which you know demographics of race/income/household size based upon), and Vizio TVs account for Y% of all TVs sold for households with incomes between A and B, and C and D you can get a confidence interval of how many people ACTUALLY saw your TV advertisement.
Samsung was/is probably trying to do something similar: All sound in your TV pipes through their home theater system, so they can "Shazam" whatever media you're watching, regardless of the source (OTT, OTA, hell even YouTube or a Downloaded Torrent on your laptop hooked up via HDMI) and phone home.
Sure, you got your $2,000 out of the customer. But what about the money you could be making between now and the next time the customer buys something?
You're giving up on tens of dollars a year by not tormenting the people who gave you money already and might do so again.
You don't want to provide more info than absolutely necessary, that could be bad from security and legal perspective.
Also, if you don't include more info, people tend to ask you less questions to clarify.
Automated updates were supposed to give us peace of mind instead of having us worried about what bug or enshittification will follow.
I’d wager that, for most Internet-connected appliances, keeping them offline or disabling autoupdates have way more pros than cons.
But if it only allows the manufacturer to remotely execute arbitrary code on a device without the user's consent, it's called an automatic software update mechanism and most people somehow consider that it's totally fine.
I am moderately surprised that they even update their firmware on some models.
1. Staged rollout of firmware updates. It’s common practice for apps and software but for some reason it’s less common with firmware. Rolling out to 1% (or less, depending on scale) of devices and waiting a day is cheap insurance. Side note: Build a good relationship with customer service people so you hear about these things immediately.
2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. In conjunction, your automated tests need to confirm that every factory firmware you’ve ever released can update to the latest firmware.
I'm still pissed off about LG removing record to disk option from our TV after an upgrade. I've only connected it to internet & upgraded assuming some of those bug fixes resolved few dlna issues otherwise it's always on internet block list.
I prefer to keep the factory firmware reset to a manual process that requires user intervention.
For example, holding down the reset button for 10 seconds after plugging the device in.
In my experience, it's not a good idea to have a device automatically roll back firmware and erase user data after failed boots. These mechanisms get triggered too easily during certain power outages (power comes on then goes off just long enough to cause multiple failed boots) or when users are doing simple things like rearranging their power cables.
Without the ability to flash from USB without a CPU doing this requires keeping spare CPUs that will work just to flash.
https://tweakers.net/reviews/10334/het-einde-van-de-high-end... (Dutch)
It's common now for medium and large companies to have some variant of a cloud platform team: People responsible for shared practices, infrastructure, and processes in the cloud.
Smart hardware companies have done the same for decades. You have a firmware platform team that handles things like update protocols, recovery protocols, testing checklists, on-device OTA update architecture, and other critical functions.
When you're a company like Samsung that continuously releases and develops products this actually increases your time to market rather than decreasing it. You let each product team focus on the parts of the firmware that make their product valuable and free them from having to roll their own update systems
If the management folks have personal health insurance, surely they must understand the concept and the need. And this is a much better deal because unlike actual insurance this is more like "invest once, enjoy forever" type of thing. And multi-stage boot chain, recovery partition and staged rollouts are not some rocket science that needs some serious expertise.
Yet, here we go. Humans are not really rational actors after all, and collective humans are even less so.
There if something goes wrong during an update, you always have a backup BIOS with the previous version (not necessarily factory settings). If the system fails to boot, it automatically switches to the backup BIOS and restores the main BIOS to the last working version.
3. have a set of conditions to mark the running firmware image as "safe" and have it become the new fallback firmware image for this scenario. That way you can have a recently up-to-date firmware version constantly trailing the new ones
So many companies have begun rolling out updates that makes the device I purchased call home before allowing any user functions and if/when that server goes down my device becomes a brick. This behavior essentially invalidates my ownership of the product and renders it to a service, provided at will by the manufacturer.
Your idea ensures my device will one day become a brick as soon as the manufacturer decides to mark their update requiring internet check-ins “safe”.
If you think I’m exaggerating check out Louis Rossmann‘s YouTube channel.
Specifically I’m talking about consumer devices, which are almost always behind a NAT config + firewall. If your soundbar has a vulnerability it’s pretty much irrelevant if someone has already breached your network.
If we’re talking about enterprise networking equipment, I still stand by my concerns that the the owner should be able to revert back to stock but the burden of responsibility is on the technician configuring this device, not the manufacturer.
I reject this mentality. I don't think it's necessary or desirable to make it impossible for people to do things that have negative consequences for themselves. Put a "here there be dragons" warning on the firmware rollback, bootloader unlock, or similar dangerous operation and let people take responsibility for the outcome.
In the case of consumer devices, most people won't even try those things; those who do risk further problems for the chance of a better outcome. In the case of enterprise networking equipment, there's an IT department that, in theory has the skills and resources necessary to make good decisions about technology.
If I pay you for a product, you have no moral right to tell me what I can and cannot do with that product, up to and including messing with the firmware, installing known-bad firmwares, wiping it and building my own firmware, whatever I want. It's mine, I paid for it, stop violating my private property rights.
> There will always be security issues, so "but security" is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever they want with a thing that they purchased from you
Just because there will always be security issues doesn't mean you shouldn't try to take care of the low hanging fruit.
I'm reminded of the time a random NPR station accidentally bricked the infotainment systems on thousands of Mazdas and because there was no factory reset feature they had to spend millions replacing head units. That's just bad design.
This doesn't work if your threat model includes denying rollbacks to prevent exploiting bugs in old firmware. I'd love to be able to roll-back firmware on some of my devices to allow me to "jailbreak" them using old firmware.
In some cases your newer firmware may be blowing e-fuses that prevent old firmware from functioning. See the Nintendo Switch, for an example.
To be clear: I think this is anti-consumer and wrong, but manufacturers absolutely do it.
Edit: I also think it should be illegal, by way of consumer regulation. I don't think consumers should have option to waive their right to manufacturers not damaging hardware they own.
Updates for these types of things always fall into three categories. Either they’re gimping some unanticipated usage, they’re trying to insert ads, or they’re trying to gather more usage data.
In my experience, products like this are only get updates when the company finds a way to extract more money:
- add more ads
- add more ads that pretend not to be ads
- to remove functionality, so it won't cannibalize sales of more expensive product
Considering the soundbar connects to a TV, console, phone, etc that are constantly releasing new versions and upgrades it makes sense to build in the function to something as simple as a soundbar to fix bugs and compatibility issues.
Samsung doesn't have the greatest track record with updates though so obviously you don't want to jump the gun on these. Hopefully not a Galaxy Watch 4 situation where they need to be mailed to Samsung to be reset because they didn't think about this during the design phase.
If price isn't the only factor for some, it is for many who would otherwise not buy these things. Sellers picked up on that long ago.
Other comments wish to see regulations, they can't outwit those marketing tricksters. For profit enterprise can, and will offer more alternatives with bigger stamps about privacy, ad-less certified and whatnot.
The alternative to an all-in-one sound bar is having regular 5.1 speakers, a nice receiver, a nice streaming box, and maybe a dumber TV and you will have absolutely the best setup but it’s a lot of putting pieces together, more space usage, and either money (if you want it right away) or a lot of waiting (if you want to get it used).
Sennheiser Max has a full computer and os running inside, they can upgrade it quite a bit. Biggest limitation on the device is HDMI 2.0 preventing 20gbps video passthrough of hdmi 2.1, however they should be able to add new audio codecs.
Unfortunately there are soooo f..ing many devices out there that don't follow the specs, no wonder given how long and complex alone the Bluetooth specifications are, and HDMI/HDCP (which a soundbar with ARC support needs...) is even worse, and don't even try to get me started on CEC because that is an even bigger pile of dung, or stuff like GPUs that run HDMI over DVI, MHL or USB-C in DP mode and god knows what else people expect to "magically work" with a 5 dollar adapter they got off of Alibaba. And no, "audit products to follow the specs" isn't a foolproof solution either. That means that everyone has to deal with everyone else's quirks and at least the most popular devices and their manufacturers have to supply firmware updates to react upon reports of quirks.
> [...] GPUs that run HDMI over DVI [...]
I thought HDMI and DVI use the same signalling (at least the 'digital part' of DVI, was it DVI-D?), just over a different connector?
In my memory only the connectors competed for adoption, and Home Entertainment industry opted for HDMI and the PC-industry opted for DVI, while the signalling was not contested (besides DVI also being able to carry analog signalling with full spin-out, and HDMI carrying audio instead). My memory might not serve me well here though.
I never thought HDMI would win :( but it makes sense I guess - Computers/their use changed :(
Now Display Port vs HDMI is a more interesting competition and it would have been nice to have a clear DP victory here.
I feel like CEC tried way too hard to be magical instead of exposing enough control for the user to be able to block certain commands from problematic devices, or even just designate that device X will always be the boss in a particular setup.
The frustration when I turn on the Steam Deck and the Apple TV goes
"Look at me. Look at me! I'm the output now"
My Sony UHD player also seems to want to grab the input sometimes too, so maybe it's Sony that's the source of the problems haha.
And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should never send power-on messages to its input devices." Because then I would just power on the device I actually want to use, it would turn on the AVR and TV, and we'd be golden.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
Yeah, that sounds a weird "feature" in the first place.
If I manually turn on the UHD player/Chromecast/PS5/whatever, it makes sense that the TV also turns on and switches to the respective input.
I could also sort of imagine that if I switched the TV to some input source, it might be convenient if the device connected to that input turns on. (Not by a lot, though. You need the device's remote/gamepad/whatever anyway to tell it what to do, so the one button press saved doesn't really buy you much.)
But what makes no sense for me is the TV turning on all input devices when it's being turned on itself. When would you ever want to have the PS4, the PS5 and the HD player running, let alone as the default behavior?
That sounds like a genuine bug in the TV.
(Also, you sound as if you have some sort of "2 <-> n" setup with n input and 2 output devices. I have no idea how CEC would even be supposed to behave in such a setup. Would an input device turn on both output devices?
TV <- AVR <- PS4, PS5, Switch, UHD
I suspect the issue is largely with the receiver (a VSX-935), as that's seemingly the component sending a turn-on signal to its inputs.
If I could, I would have probably run everything to the TV and just done all the audio over eARC, but the TV is on the other end of a 50' HDMI cable, so I definitely need the receiver as an in-rack multiplexer.
Not because the device changes, not because the software changes, but because the world does
Even if it doesn't need to contact the internet you're still going to want it to connect through cables. There's good reason to connect through bluetooth.
But why should it contact over the internet? Well it sure is nice to be able to stream music from my NAS. There's utility in that. There's also utility in the parent company updating firmware to support new audio codecs. Or to support new algorithms. If my device is gaining more utility, that's a great thing! And of course, if it is connected wirelessly in any way (including bluetooth) I sure as hell would like updates with respect to security.
Without this, the thing becomes e-waste. The environment moves. Time marches on. No thing can exist in isolation, no matter how hard you try. Again, software rots, not because the software changes, but because the world does.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is abuse of that power. It isn't for the benefit of the customer. The problem is managers pushing to release before things are ready. The need for speed with no direction. To not even consider in the calculus of decision making the tremendous costs of when things go wrong. And how this lesson is never learned despite facing the problem time and time again. Issues like this now cost tons of engineering hours, tons of lawyer hours, and ultimately will cost tons in rebates and refunds. How many weeks of work is that equivalent to? Sure, it doesn't always result in catastrophic failure like this, sometimes it results in smaller failures, sometimes small enough they can be brushed off. But those are still costs that no one considers. That's the problem here.
So I do get all the advantages of a connected device, but if the adapter is bricked, I can easily replace just that small device. And more likely, when there’s a new standard, most of my equipment is unaffected.
I believe you're missing the forest for the trees. My argument is invariant to the specific device we're talking about.
With electronics you can still isolate functionality like in software how we wrap things into functions. But like software sometimes we need to break that for optimization. Think like Apple M chips. They do it in the most annoying way, but integration is helpful. Ideally in a speaker though you should be able to fuck everything up and still allow for raw input.
As for the Apple thing, well that's a bigger issue because we really should be using open protocols and fuck walled gardens. Walled gardens are part of the problem we're talking about
Sure, you could do everything through a static circuit and require things being fed with speaker wire. But if you add a microcontroller you're going to be able to do much more, get better sound quality, and protect your equipment. Do your speakers have batteries? Do they plug into wall? Either way you can better control power levels. Do you want to boost bass? Fix corrupted signals? Do you want to process signals from anything other than a bare wire?
Sure, you don't need a microcontroller in a speaker. But we also don't need them in our cars. You don't need them in your fucking kettle. But personally, I find them useful and considering how cheap they are it's worth the basically $0 increased price.
See my other argument. The issue isn't that there's a microcontroller in the speaker. The issue is bricking the device. Don't confuse the means in which a bad actor operates with the bad actor themselves. You'll never stop the bad actor by just banning everything tool they abuse. You'll end up with nothing.
That just isn't true though, is it? How would a microcontroller add sound quality?
There's much more signal processing you can do besides FFT btw and many can improve signal quality and thus sound quality. Even something like a built in equalizer. Sure, you can do this all with hardware by creating all the right filters but you can do more in a smaller package with a computer
Of course they could be designed to be simpler and have whatever input device is used (e.g. the TV) handle fancy features like mobile phone support.
Because for free you only get the first 15 levels of volume. If you want to get to 25, you need to pay a subscription.
I thought it was obvious... how does the seat heating work in your car? /s
I owned it for at least six months before this occurred the first time.
In theory, I could do a USB update of the firmware and hope that fixes it. In practice, they want my serial number to let me download it. No thanks, I'll pass, even though it's never been connected to WiFi or Ethernet and never will be. I'll just reset it every once in a while.
Out of curiosity, why is that a problem to you? Granted, it is strange; I went through the process for my TCL Roku who's wifi stopped working (still not fixed, and now a second, 3yo TCL Roku has bricked itself. nice!)
I don't know what's in that data. And if I don't know what's in it, I'm not inclined to proceed; you might need my serial number to know if you're giving me the right software, but you don't need challenge/response for that. They sold me a cheap TV in hopes of collecting info on everything I watch, whether via Roku or just screen analysis. No thanks, and I have no interest in making it easier for them to break into my WiFi. I'm sure it would connect itself automatically to an open WiFi.
It's a little paranoid, but they really are out to get us (or at least our data).
It's not only media companies with DRM
IoT integrations like Alexa come with numerous security requirements that are often good ideas in theory but lead to hacky workarounds to meet certification requirements
Of course then you have MS which basically just turned XBox into a cheap but totally locked down gaming PC (since there are very few Xbox exclusives these days).
It also doesn't cause (intentional) incompatibility problems like HDMI DRM does.
My point is, it (and Youtube) killed piracy for the most part when it comes to music. Trading CDs full of mp3s used to be a sport in school a decade or two ago, these days why would anyone even want to invest the time when Spotify has everything anyway at a price point school kids can afford it?
Netflix used to become the same thing for movies, but the greed of studios killed it and now it's more expensive to have the large stream services than cable TV.
I'm not sure that's really a memo I'd like them to get. We don't need more subscription services where you don't get to own you content and everything can be taken away at any time.
Same thing.
> deemed inappropriate
Ooh! Deeming! Can I deem too? Huh? Can I? I have a number of candidates.
But in any case, students are usually NOT the customer here even if they are the end user.
Im not a fan of firmware lockdowns but I understand other people may value security over moddability.
this should be especially trivial when your device have some usb ports.
you can keep all requirements of only newer or the same version of firmware to flash, with all refuse checks.
if you mess up, you can allow consumers to flash fix using regular pendrive
Clearly the latter is heavily preferred by most companies.
Whats worse is that a lot of the affected hardware was near or EOL anyway, so Cambium was simply helping rescue devices headed for the scrap heap.
Copyright and patent have morphed into evils that drive anti-consumer and anti-competitive behavior, and have driven a “subscription” model that allows rent seekers to achieve their wildest dreams.
Android systems can do this today. After an orderly shutdown of new software, then it can mark the new stuff as good and not allow older software to boot.
Especially if there is an internal testing stage before actually rolling out to production. It's possible that the users seeing the bricked devices are in fact limited to the initial wave, but the damage is already done.
See their new app debacle which coupled a non-reversible firmware update that made the hardware incompatible with the old app.
There are commercial offerings (like mender.io, never used) that basically specialize in providing rock solid update infrastructure, but that again takes investment and organizational priority that doesn't exist for non-feature code.
> "One of every board revision we've ever produced"
The, ah, "special" people we had running engineering didn't even put in the work to be capable of the software querying the board rev. We had to play games like running certain motors past a position limit and seeing if there were limit switches there (or not) to guesstimate board revs.
I'm guessing stories like this are common.
I'm trying to buck the trend though and on the new embedded system I'm working on, I've specifically designed the upgrade system to be as reliable as I can make it. It goes something like this:
- The new firmware is downloaded to the secondary application slot.
- Just prior to rebooting, the entire state data of the system is serialized as a document and stored on a flash partition.
- The upgrade flag is set, the system reboots and MCUboot does its thing.
- The new firmware finds out a upgrade happened, clears out all the data partitions, restores from the document and then clears out its partition.
The system is basically sanitized and restored after each upgrade. It's also the same codepath that handles saving and restoring the system's configuration by the end-user as well as settings management. If the document schema is for an older version, run the N-to-N+1 schema upgraders on it prior to applying instead of trying to patch the system in-place. If something goes horribly wrong, flip a jumper to trigger the heavy-duty sanitization that nukes the entire external flash (internal flash only contains the bootloader, primary application slot and factory parameters so it's essentially read-only once the application boots).
It might be hubris, but I hope it's good enough that I'll never see a bricked card that can't be resurrected by a factory reset with this project (assuming no hardware damage, no internal flash corruption and no bricking firmware getting signed with production keys seeping through the cracks despite all the checks in place).
I kept the summary short and simple, partly because that product isn't out yet and also because I don't want to bury the lead with a lot of extraneous details that we do take into consideration, but are irrelevant to the big picture idea of an upgrade method that factory resets the card and restores its state with a codepath shared with the end-user save/reset and configuration mechanisms.
This sort of functional interdependency has become increasingly common in embedded these days with heterogenous SoCs.
One thing I've seen before is to separate downloading from rebooting, broadcast the manifest for the updates between all the independent processors (all updates need a declarative manifest for so, so many reasons) to check locally, and only proceed when they all agree. Rollbacks are initiated if they can't see everyone with their expected versions afterwards.
Still isn't perfect either.
I won't get into details, but in some of the horrors stories I've heard the distributed system happened to be entirely software in nature. There are plenty of creative ways to mess up an upgrade on a uniprocessor system.
Reverting to factory state is the last resort. You don't have users do it unless there is no other good state to return to on the device.
> Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn’t mean it’s compatible with the world today.
That's why I said you have to include this in your test procedures.
When you're planning for the long term you can accommodate for these things on your servers.
> That's why I said you have to include this in your test procedures.
You can’t test the world. Even if your servers can correctly respond to requests from old software, it doesn’t mean that the network between you will too.
In the factory reset state, things should have a USB flash drive firmware install route which could be used to bring back working root certs, etc.
Of course again this depends on whether the mfg is worried about DRM bypass hacks that are found later on in the factory firmware.
I'd support legislation to issue stiff fines for devices that can't be factory reset at any time, with the only exception being for directly-consumer-benefitting anti-theft (so, iCloud lock is okay).
I think all the OP was saying, is: Suppose you’re releasing firmware version N for some widget you make. Now, for all versions V in (0..N-1), verify that applying N to V works correctly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse
New firmware is pushed in phases 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% then full scale.
Each stage has some delay incorporated for acquisition/application and then for telemetry (including support contacts from affected accounts) to determine impact and allow for regression fixes.
The other reason they would phase launches is because of firmware builds being used across multiple CPE models and hardware revisions, where only a small subset of hardware could wind up being problematic, but not discovered until deployment.
When you have millions of devices deployed, even a fraction of devices having an issue can create a shit storm on the support side of things.
It all seems so obvious once you know to think about it.
#1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers' warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed here.
#2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about management above.
After many years of being burned I always delay system level non-security -related updates at least several days after launch to mitigate the risk.
Why on earth a sound bar needs to update its firmware? Why firmware needs to be in a couple of tweeters and a woofer? It should basically output audio from an input source.
Offline first approach respects user autonomy and creates a natural safety net against bad updates. Plus, it means your product keeps working even when servers change or get shut down years later or a nuclear war happens. Sure, connectivity has benefits, but a speaker's main job is playing sound, not phoning home. Building offline-first also forces better engineering decisions about longevity and graceful degradation.
It's so hard to find any offline-first apps/devices nowawdays, which is sad to see in a world of algorithms and AI.
This whole situation reminds me of this: https://programmerhumor.io/linux-memes/thats-the-attitude-sa...
The tragedy is that "respecting customer ownership" is now seen as leaving money on the table rather than building lasting brand loyalty through quality.
A failsafe firmware reset back to a safe and secure state yes. The factory state is not necessarily that, so no.
I think devices should keep a last known good state firmware but keeping a full factory state immutable firmware would be irresponsible for many usecases.
I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies to actually "hear" their users.
I'm not sure I understand various industries' conventions...
While interviewing for a principal engineer job, I was meeting individually with a bunch of team leads and managers, and one engineer asked how would I design firmware updating for the company's product (which was more critical, complex, and expensive than a soundbar).
I assumed they were probably trying to see whether I would throw in some robustness/resilience (not oversimplify it). So I sketched it out, while hitting notes like diffs, downloading and assembling in staging space, imperfect networking, having at least two firmware "slots", backing out upon boot loop or failure soon after boot, gradual deployment to installed base, contrasting with some less-critical consumer product firmware update practices, etc.
(Either that was a bad answer, or they got distracted thinking about something I'd said, because I was getting odd subconscious backchannel cues, and they were unresponsive when I tried elicit more requirements or guidance about what they were looking for. Maybe there was some standard embedded systems programmer canned answer that I was supposed to recite (analogous to the Web brogrammer 'system design' interview), and they couldn't think of how to nudge me towards the shibboleth without saying it?)
Or perhaps to the very first released firmware version. This way they don't have to support updating from any version to the latest, just from the first one.
Do you mean like a physical button? That could work, though I'm not sure I've ever seen it. Holding down power for 10 seconds (or whatever) usually just erases user data, but doesn't reset firmware. Are you aware of any device that does this? But does it require some meta-firmware to roll back the firmware? What if that meta-firmware has a security flaw and needs to be updated? And that update is faulty?
If you're talking about a code sent from your servers to devices to reset, that seems like asking for the impossible. If a firmware update bricks the device, that may very well brick its ability to receive codes at all.
In both situations, it starts to feel like a problem of infinite regress...
That's a nifty mechanism that also allows downgrade attacks, so it has cybersecurity implications that may or may not be acceptable. Furthermore, it might not be practical or even be possible to restore the system to factory condition due to technical reasons.
The team next door allows its systems to downgrade to a previous minor version with a mandatory factory reset. It however refuses downgrading to a previous major version because it implies the bootloader was upgraded or the storage was repartitioned and they really don't want to rollback that.
Ahh! But you are just leasing the software!! Samsung is technically the owner!!
That point has practical issues, because most consumer electronic customers are technically dumb.
Consequently, you end up with a long-tail of deployed device firmware versions, which makes support a nightmare (fix this external integration that broke... across 20 different versions).
I'd phrase it more in terms of:
It's a speaker that worked fine until Samsung unilaterally broke it. I don't think the customers are the dumb ones here.
My anecdote is the opposed of yours: they were interested in knowing why something wasn't working, but only as long as you're willing to be patient, talk slowly, and explain any unknown concepts to them, if required.
Insulting them, or just telling them it's their fault something wasn't working would be a sure way to get a negative reaction instead.
Additionally, I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not demeaning them. They simply do not care to know and that's perfectly fine. I wouldn't demean someone for not understanding how their car works, or even failing to get their oil changed. The computer is a tool to file taxes and shop on amazon for most people, they have a million other priorities in their lives that come before making sure windows is up to date, let alone actually considering its security. It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.
Sorry if it sounded like I was implying you thought that, or called them stupid, I didn't mean it that way. That statement wasn't trying to 'refute' anything you said either - it was just expanding on my anecdote of what I saw that it worked or not, whether in a professional environment or somewhere else.
Now, replying to your recent post,
> It's the job of these companies to ensure their technology can be used safely without consideration by the end user.
I think we just hard disagree here. I believe ultimately the user is/should be on control of how their own computer is used.
Beyond that I think total control can still be achieved in the realm of hobbyists who can run Linux or flash alternative firmwares etc.
Like I said, automatic updates are an evil. But the general populace will absolutely defer every security update until the end of time so long as they don't have to spend five minutes waiting to get to their desktop.
Obviously vendors enshitify their products via firmware updates and potentially brick devices or introduce new vulnerabilities but, it's ludicrous to pretend that the general populace are good stewards of their internet connected devices or that they ever will be. They simply do not care, they never will, and its up to the rest of us to design products for the lowest common denominator if we want protect end users and have a safer internet.
Because the alternative is worse. It's up to companies to provide security-only updates that customers can trust and will CHOOSE to install.
I want to be able to opt-in to updates of my devices with official updates without the fear of them being turned into useless e-waste...
Most owners want just plug and play, so it makes sense.
Even third point is pretty moot. We don't do that for hardware, why for software... A component is no longer manufactured? Tough luck, hopefully you stockpiled it.
I would rather have a bunch of mildly responsive legislators setting the boundaries of what is acceptable than a bunch of middle-managers trying to justify their salary to their private equity overlords.
Prison time is an appropriate remedy for theft.
Construction, hardware, radiation, dam and wastewater engineers are highly regulated professions. Do you take responsibility for bugs in your technology? Do you have insurance for your mistakes in professional work? Are you an engineer or a coder? Are you certified to do your job or just passed a boot camp?
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
What was the need for the global instance 0->1 rollout of the firmware over the air ???????????????
could they perhaps test it on a small subset? perhaps on Samsung CEO's home system, not the customers'?
previous used https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/13/samsungs-chief-st...
new one uses, but just does not tell it.
apply display is good with apple tv.
and ceo dislikes automatically installed free to play tv apps and ads. as samsung does.
and here unwanted apps installed randomly
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ztuv0l/samsung_sma...
Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned obsolescence.
NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN
With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and that is about it.
I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't get updated applications.
Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product that is support for a decade.
In the event that one wants the app functionality, they’ll always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC’s are weaker than what you find in that $40 “Chromecast with Google TV.” so they’re pretty horrible to use even while they are current and supported.
Being a Philips (TP Vision), it also has Ambilight, which is nice.
It’s a few years old though, so no guarantees that newer Philips (TP Vision) models work the same way.
Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices.
Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.
If you're saying the software stops working because the backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a proper versioning system and do not touch the backend service, and it also should work forever.
[0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-a...
I wish there was some trivial real-life applicable solution to this that big companies would be motivated to follow, but I don't see it. Asking for most users to be tinkering techies or outright hackers ain't realistic, many people these days often don't accept basic aspects of reality if it doesn't suit their current comfy view, don't expect much.
Don’t get me wrong, allowing users to add their own trust anchors is absolutely a good thing. But it wouldn’t change anything if the vendor did what GP suggested, which is that the vendor "[does] not touch the backend service." Because one day, their TLS certificate would expire, and they would technically no longer be able to deliver security updates even if the user wanted them.
Just keep using the expired certificate forever.
Sure - that means if someone leaks the private key that everyone worldwide needs to do a firmware update to get security.
But that's probably less user harm than everyone worldwide needing to do a firmware update to replace an expired cert, and having a dead device otherwise.
Mentioning that certificates expire was directed against GP’s unreasonable demand that the vendor "do not touch the backend service." This doesn’t have to do anything with the buyer.
For instance, suppose a streaming service starts requiring a new login method. They have to update their apps to use this new API. If there are and have been over a dozen different distinct smart television operating systems in the past 15 years, and there will be a dozen more in the next 15 years, it’s unreasonable to expect that even companies the size of say, Netflix, are going to reach far enough back in their history to update all those apps. They probably don’t have developers who understand those systems anymore.
And also, the software distribution mechanisms for each of those platforms are probably no longer intact either in order to receive an update. While it’s true that my Panasonic Blu-ray player that I bought in 2009 is still perfectly functional, and has a Netflix app, I assume it doesn’t work and that Panasonic would be hard pressed to distribute me a working updated app.
The only way things would be much different would be if technology progressed at a far slower pace, so there had been no need to adopt any breaking changes to how the app is built, how the apps and firmware was distributed, etc.
Most people don't encounter it because their device was updated at least once. People should be less trusting in flash drives than they are, I recently pulled three USB flash sticks out of storage and two of the three are now unhappy.
There's a strong argument that consumer electronics should be able to be more incrementally upgraded. Including things like baseline upgrades for certificates. One of the things about TVs and these systems is that they are usually running on something like OverlayFS to avoid corruption of the base OS and enhancing security/integrity. They focus on replacing the underlying image, which is often security signed as well. If you screw something up with a device that's in a customers home then you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing it, the manufacturers have their war stories in this regard, so they're very risk adverse.
As for freezing the backend, you can't. Your API will evolve and for example if your database changes then your backend services will need to be touched. That database will change, some metadata or label will need to change. Even if you keep the API the same you'll need to maintain the legacy backend. Then you need that service running, consuming compute, for years even if there's hardly anyone using it and it's costing money. Then you need security patches for the backend service because the framework needs upgrading or the OS needs upgrading. Eventually the backend framework will be EoL/EoS and so you need to spend to upgrade. It's like saying we'll keep a Java backend running on a public facing API well beyond it's life, log4j anyone?
Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.
The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.
Or just connect the TV to your PC where you have the freedom to run whatever software you want. Why replace one crappy "smart" device with another.
I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded.
Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable.
My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.
Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream.
So inappropriate for the children.
The bug, or Baywatch itself?
I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).
Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV. Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner and hooking that up to the A/V receiver.
Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use to control them if for some reason you don't want to use their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to it from a computer or mobile device.
They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets the current volume setting of mine:
which when run gives me this at the moment:TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet.
They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV?
Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.
After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made.
For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products.
And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.
If OEMs differentiated their TVs based on compute performance, consumers might be able to make an informed choice. (See smartphones: consumers expect a Galaxy Sxx to have faster compute than a Galaxy Axx.)
If not, consumers just see TVs with similar specs at different prices, so of course they’re going to pick the cheaper one.
This is why we ended up with phrases like "Full HD".
The average consumer doesn't know what these numbers mean, people who read hackernews aren't the 99%. Phones have helped a little bit with widening the idea of newer = better, but ask the average person how many cores their phone is or how much RAM it has? They don't know.
Also, it's hard to benchmark TV performance as a selling point. Perhaps sites like rtings need to have UX benchmarks as well? They could measure channel change times, app load times, etc. That might create some pressure to compete.
Comparing models from 2005/2015/2025, for example. Most people literally can't tell 4k from 1080 and anything new in the HD race mostly feels like a scam. The software capabilities are all there. I think to differentiate from the no-name stuff, longevity is going to become a more significant differentiator.
One of the significant problems is that 80% of TV SOCs are made by one company, MStar (or their subsidiary). And there's only a handful of companies who make the motherboards with those chipsets. Anyone entering the market either buys those or isn't competitive. It's hard to be competitive because everything is so concentrated and consolidated. Since ST Microelectronics and Broadcom left the TV chip market it became a much less diverse market.
We were an established company who made software for STBs, we had done a ground-up build of what was probably the most capable and powerful framework for TV/DVRs. The new design was commissioned from us by a well known open source Linux distro, who then decided they didn't want to continue with the project after they realised that getting into TV OS's was hard. We then took on ownership of that project but getting investment or even commitments from buyers was impossible.
The retailers and TV brands wanted to rehash the same thing over and over because that was tried and tested. It didn't matter that we made something that was provably better and used modern approaches, it wasn't worth the effort for them. If you can't order about 500,000 TVs then you're not going to get anyone to make anything custom for you these days and you'll not make a profit.
--
It was a DVR/TV framework that was designed by people who had worked for big names in the TV business with a clean slate. It would handle up to 16 different broadcast networks (e.g. satellite, terrestrial, cable) and up to 255 tuners, even hot pluggable. Fast EPG processing and smart recording to either internal storage or USB storage. It was user friendly and allowed for HTML5 apps. We pushed it as much as we could but eventually on the brink of financial ruin the company was sold to someone who had no interest in what had been built. I will always feel that something great was lost.
You are literally the first person I have ever seen say this online, besides myself. I have worked in hardware for years and can vouch that there is no such thing as planned obsolescence, but obsession over cost is paramount. People think LED bulbs fail because they are engineered that way, but really it's because they just buy whatever is cheapest. You cannot even really support a decent mid-grade market because it just gets eviscerated by low cost competitors.
He said "Hah, we can lose way more than that!"
Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail! not BOM!) can be staggeringly faster and generally better than any TV controller board I've seen?
I really want to highlight how ludicrous the difference is: My $4,000 "flagship" OLED TV has a 1080p SDR GUI that has multi-second pauses and stutters at all times but "somehow" Apple can show me a silky smooth 4K GUI in 10 bit HDR.
This is dumbass hardware-manufacturer thinking of "We saved 5c! Yay!" Of course, now every customer paying thousands is pissed and doesn't trust the vendor.
This is also why the TVs go obsolete in a matter of months, because the manufacturers are putting out a firehose of crap that rots on the shelves in months.
Apple TV hasn't had a refresh in years and people are still buying it at full retail price.
I do. Not. Trust. TV vendors. None of them. I trust Apple. I will spend thousands more with Apple on phones, laptops, speakers, or whatever they will make because of precisely this self-defeating decisions from traditional hardware vendors.
I really want to grab one of these CEOs by the lapels and scream in their face for a little while: "JUST COPY APPLE!"
This is the result of Apple being vertically integrated and reusing components from other product lines in products like Apple TV. The SoC used in the Apple TV are from lower-tier bins of chips produced for mobile applications.
With the Apple TV, you are getting a SoC that is effectively the same as a recent-year iPhone. With most other Smart TV devices you are getting a low computational power SoC, Raspberry Pi tier, with processing blocks that are optimized for the video playback and visual processing use cases.
Apple also does this with the iPhone where the non-flagship variants will reuse components or designs from prior years.
Television/Smart TV manufacturer margins are in the single-digit percentages and the Samsung and LG tv businesses are significantly threatened since their high-volume products have been commoditized from Chinese producer competition. Most potential customers are shopping based on screen size per dollar, versus specs like peak luminance and contrast ratios. Flagship TV products like "The Wall" are low-volume halo products. Lifestyle products like "The Frame" exist because they are able to differentiate to certain segments of customers that place enough value the packaging aesthetics to buy a higher priced product with better margins for the manufacturers.
Most other hardware device manufacturers are jealous of Apple's margins. Nvidia would probably be one of the few exceptions.
Thin margins on commodity tier products drive these manufacturers to cut their BOM costs as much as possible, even if it makes the product worse in other ways. This is also the big driver for why ads are appearing as part of the Smart TV experience at the device/screen level. Vizio for example shared that they made more money from their ACR business than they did from the device sales themselves. There are companies with business models based around giving you the screen for "free" in exchange for permanent ad-space. Even adjacent products and companies like Roku have business models where they are selling their hardware at near break-even cost points because their business model is built around 'services' from having a large user audience.
Samsung's flagship mobile phone products tend to ship with Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in competitive markets, such as USA/North America, versus their "in-house" Exnyos SoC used in markets where consumers tend to have less choice (e.g. Samsung S-series phones with Snapdragon for USA, Exnyos for EU and KDM markets)
There is no excuse for TV manufacturers when selling premium devices costing thousands of dollars.
TV panels must have a near 0% defect rate and a single piece of dust during the manufacture will render the finished panel e-waste. The bigger the panel the risk of a defect goes up exponentially because the surface area for any defect becomes bigger. It follows the same issue as to why chip companies introduced chiplets, the smaller die sizes improves the yield and they can throw away less silicon.
A TV panel is basically a 50in chip, and a mobile phone display is a 6in chip.
I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client.
Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.
Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last year’s model—which I had just purchased—so we could test with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting that platform.
Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the quote though.
LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.
Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.
(disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)
I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan.
All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues.
We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.
Are you happy with it spying on you?
That's what all Samsung televisions do, and there is no way to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for targeted advertising.
This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots at regular intervals and upload them to very insecure hosting.
I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/home-entertainment/how...
1. https://eandt.theiet.org/2024/12/11/smart-tvs-take-screensho...
Fwiw, to the best of my awareness, I don't receive any advertising from my Samsung TV other than perhaps the strip of suggested things to watch (half of which are "continue watching" linked to watch history in the app I'm hovering over) that lives above the app list. This is wildly different from Google TV, which has a core value prop of embedding advertising right in your face.
It takes less than a minute to disable ad tracking and ACR on a Samsung TV.
Settings > General > Terms > disable two checkboxes.
Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...
I've done my share of embarrassing mistakes and each time I've felt awful. Nothing on this scale though.
At least with my Samsung soundbar, the remote can change the volume, the subwoofer volume and change between modes (standard, surround, game). But if I want to enable night mode, I have to use the SmartThings app. There's no way to enable it using the remote. What's worse, the app often hangs when connecting to the soundbar, requiring me to force stop and restart it. So sometimes toggling a feature that should be a single button on the remote takes me over a minute.
Samsung is right next to HP on my list of brands I will never ever buy in my entire life.