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Comment by mrkwse | Hacker News Reader

As someone who a few years ago worked for a broadcaster and had a small amount of experience with building applications for television, Sony were always ambitious for their UX and would make good decisions such as going with what was at the time Android TV.

Sony had a couple of issues a few years ago:

  - they would always produce televisions with underpowered hardware for the software experiences
  - their operating systems would have as many as three competing interfaces in different parts
    - Android Apps
    - weird XMB evolution for settings etc.
    - separate third party interface for digital tuner that also had a duplicated wrapped XMB interface

I wonder if they've managed to remedy some of that mess, as they would have been some of the most solid sets if it weren't for the bloat and chaos.

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> they would always produce televisions with underpowered hardware for the software experiences

AFAIK they upgraded the SOC in 2020's mid-year model X900H to MediaTek MT5895. I have that TV and everything feels very snappy, it's good enough that I have a 2019 Shield TV sitting unused[1]. They feel pretty much the same (despite the Shield's Tegra being massively overpowered), even in game streaming performance (Steam Link and NVIDIA GameStream/Moonlight).

The common sentiment is that the new SOC is ["finally"] great. I wonder if they reused that SOC in the new XR series or picked another one, but either way it looks like they're not underpowered anymore. Bloatware was apparently massively reduced last year too, and there's a "delete all demo [retail] content" option in settings to reduce it further.

[1] I originally bought it because I figured (A) all Smart TVs are underpowered and (B) Smart TVs are not trustworthy, but this model is powerful enough and you can fully opt-out of analytics, even disable the Samba (not SMB) APK entirely.

I think if TVs had a replaceable compute board, I'd be really on board with it. Sort of like plugging a Roku directly into the TV so it acted as the control card for the TV hardware as well, but was still user-replaceable/upgradeable.

It's amazing how the right/wrong task can cause your smart TV to slog around like it's a Windows 98 machine on dialup.

I would say that plugging in a roku/apple tv is essentially doing just that. I never got why TV even come with their smart TV software.

I'd like live TV from the channel selection fully integrated, not have to jump remotes, etc. I also think a single connection point should be able to not just display video and control the device, but power it too.

Perhaps at least higher output USB specs on TVs might eventually escape a separate power plug to the wall, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

One less thing to worry about. Also, it can ruin the “clean” look some people want.

This mounting solution worked well to maintain the clean look for me:

https://innovelis.com/

This is something I am so, so confused about and something that's desperately needed in this indsutry. I know they want "built-in obsolescence" but doing it through underpowered compute is insane to me in 2021. All that does is force me to buy an external box for no reason, the TV isn't getting replaced until I want a better screen.

Sony would do well to allow a replaceable compute module - they could even charge a premium for it.

Intel had the right idea with its Compute Card [0], but decided to sunset it a couple of years ago. It's clear that the way we're manufacturing these devices now is not the way forward. We're putting computers in televisions and refrigerators that can barely keep up with today's requirements, yet the general population expects these devices to have a lifespan of >10 years. With global warming as it is this is starting to border on criminal negligence.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-compute-card-bad-ide...

When I heard about it, I thought the Compute Card was fantastic. ...Unfortunately the first time I heard about it was the announcement it was being retired.

Samsung tried that for one or two years but then they priced the upgrade at $500 IIRC.

I don't think it was that expensive, but it was definitely more expensive than it should have been and was barely marketed by Samsung. No real surprise that it flopped.

Just realised I never mentioned anything from other manufacturers:

- LG were great because their hardware was appropriately powerful at the time and WebOS was well optimised (as well as being straightforward to develop for)

- Samsung were fine from a user perspective but had a lot of quirks for development

- Panasonic were similar to Sony (underpowered Android) but had far worse remotes and less spaghetti UX

I have a XBR-55X930D which is the 2016 model with Android TV and no XBR. I also have an older dumb tv Sony with the XBR interface.

You get what you pay for and the cheaper models have sluggish internals (although I think its fine on mine). That and the UX issues you mention do not apply to all Sony tvs.

Everything I've mentioned certainly applies to the 2017 flagship A1 OLED (which I use daily at home), so it was not limited to the cheaper models.

By XMB evolution I mean it's not quite the XMB, but the secondary menus when you get into settings etc. are carried over, and it's a separate interface and paradigm to the Android interface.

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