In Defense of Dumb TVs | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Dumb TVs

frame.work

439 pointsrbanffy377 comments

I fully agree about dumb TVs for personal use. Even having to wait for your TV's OS to boot up when you turn it on is a terrible UX.

However, when it comes to buying a TV for your conference room where you have a TV running 12hrs/day (when you're not a small startup with 10ppl), invest in a proper commercial TV like NEC or (my personal favorite brand) iiyama: 1) the're dumb TVs from the start, 2) you get proper warranties and support, 3) you can get larger TVs without 4K HDR (which your computer may not support anyway), 4) the color grading is more apt for your PowerPoint slides, etc and finally, 5) these panels are actually rated for that kind of use and won't break after a few weeks. From my experience building conference rooms, that investment is actually worth it

The problem is not the mere boot time of your SmartTV. You are waiting for the SmartTV to send your viewing profile home. That's a lot of data. Before that the UI stays frozen. In earlier SmartTV OS versions it was immediate startup, the delay only started some years ago. Never upgrade your OS.

Maybe they are even sending home recorded audio of what you did in your bedroom, that long it lasts.

Citation needed. There's no evidence that any TV sends this data at boot (and frankly there's no need to, it can send this data later on).

It's also not a lot of data, of course. "Viewing data" is under a megabyte.

No citation possible, because the data is encrypted. What is measurable is the delayed startup. Of course they can send the data later, but that's not what is measured.

Not saying that they don't send data at startup (but it is more likely that it will be delayed by around a minute or two), but not acknowledging that dumb (OLED/LCD) televisions' faster boot times is simply due to having literally fewer functions is missing the bush. Even well-optimized embedded Linux still takes around 5 seconds to boot to init whereas dumb TVs are already (usually) finished in 3 seconds.

> No citation possible

Then why are you saying something as if it is fact? You don't know what is happening there, you've assumed. You're guessing.

Maybe is not fact. Maybe is a guess

Then what is the point of mentioning it? Maybe your bones are blue. Maybe not. It's a guess. It could go either way! So why mention it at all?

NEC’s are expensive so it’ll be tougher passing approval at the expense department.

This smart TV business has to end, I have a Samsung “The Frame” and it looks a lot like those NEC’s you’re mentioning. In fact, it’s the perfect conference TV. The problem is that when I keep it disconnected from the Internet, I get a message on screen every time I power it off. I’m going to try changing the region to a more internet-sparse region to see if that helps.

Maybe you could give it your wifi password and block all traffic at the router?

Most smart TVs turn on nearly instantaneously because they do not really shut down with a typical "soft off", so neither do they need to boot up with "soft on".

I’m really pleased the author called out the Apple TV as a device that lets you avoid ads. We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place.

There’s lots of griping about the cost of an Apple TV 4k, but I’ll pay that extra $100 to avoid ads and not be tracked so extensively.

Yep plus when you start to stretch the Fire Stick and a few other products you find a number of issues. For example I've spend probably in the region of 40 hours trying to fix issues with Firestick and Echo Studio. When they work well they are excellent value for money products. But then you get a glitch (like audio dropping because of a lack of sync) and it becomes a morass. Hours upon hours and no solution (eventually getting to, we need to send this to our Devs). Apple stuff just works. Not as cheap and maybe not as hackable in some ways but it just works.

I never had a single issue with my roommates' Samsung smart TV (casting or otherwise) besides some buggy apps. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on "just works."

Great except for the fact that smart TVs connected to the Internet have all sorts of privacy concerns:

* https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/01/fbi-smart-tv-security/

Samsung actually released a TV app to tell you what it's doing:

* https://fortune.com/2020/01/18/samsung-smart-tv-data-privacy...

Which is nice, in a way, but it'd be better if they just didn't.

I'd be much more trusting of Apple TV being connected to the Internet than with a smart TV.

As a bad alternative. By the smart TVs, add a Pihole to the network. Block port 53 if it isn’t from the Pihole and add an as list like the one below.

It seems to work well.

https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...

1. I'm not going to tell my parents to get a Pihole.

2. Wait until your smart TV starts using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to by-pass it. (Paul Vixie will be proved right eventually IMHO.)

That is a bad alternative, as in no alternative at all really. I don't want a device that requires me to do network engineering to prevent it from doing things I didn't ask for or want.

Just works vs. just works and also uploads screenshots of what you’re watching for ad targeting analysis isn’t much of a contest.

Bought a Samsung TV that purports to support Airplay. It works... except for some apps can’t stream to it. Turns out that some apps can only Airplay to official Apple devices and not the Samsung TVs despite marketing. I was planning to neuter the network from my TV and go with an Apple TV anyways, but that sealed the deal.

I’m fairly sure that’s DRM getting in the way. I use an open source tool to emulate an airplay target but it won’t work on copyright content.

My parents have a Samsung TV and it’s incredibly slow to the point it’s difficult to change the volume. I think they pushed out OS updates that made it slower.

Ehn, no vp9 though (last I checked)... so if you watch a lot of YT in 4K, it uses more bandwidth than say Google TV.

I don't think most people care about vp9 or codec wars. It's not something on almost anyone's minds.

h.264 and h.265 are the dominant codecs, regardless.

And Netflix found that h.265 consumed less bandwidth than vp9, not more: https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...

People should care if they want to watch YouTube in more than 720p resolution...

tvOS has supported vp9 since last year, the youtube app however has been slow getting that message...

https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/18/4k-youtube-videos-still-not-c...

Somehow, google has made it so that the best way to watch YouTube on an Apple TV is to open YouTube.com in a browser on another apple device and airplay to the Apple TV.

Looks like it's been supported since October 2020:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/3/21500399/apple-tv-youtube...

I like the apple tv interface, but I really disliked the remote that ships with it. The touchpad like interface feels really awkward, i would lift it up the wrong way pretty much every time. I remember reading about an apple certified 3rd party remote that was more like a traditional tv remote but that was only sold in the european market for some reason. If they ever decide to switch back to a proper remote i'll take a look at apple tv again. I'll keep running a roku til that happens.

Not a huge fan of the Apple TV remote either (But I also don't hate it). The good news is that the Apple TV plays nice with stock TV remotes + game console controllers — I use my 8bitdo Sn30 Pro, but PS/Xbox controllers should work fine too.

If you already own an extra gamepad, then it's worth a try and doesn't cost extra. There's a few gems in Apple Arcade, which was a surprise.

> Not a huge fan of the Apple TV remote either (But I also don't hate it). The good news is that the Apple TV plays nice with stock TV remotes + game console controllers — I use my 8bitdo Sn30 Pro, but PS/Xbox controllers should work fine too.

Thanks, this is nice to know! I'll keep this in mind for whenever I'm ready to replace my Roku.

I didn’t like it at first, but now it’s my favorite tvbox remote ever.

Mainly because it doesn’t take batteries, is flat, works great with my phone, and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.

I do pick it up the wrong way a lot, but it’s better than all other devices I’ve tried- fire, roku, tv, wd.

Just not having to find doubleA batteries in the past few months has made me accept it.

The built in batteries are indeed nice and I did like that aspect of the remote.

> and I can use the touchpad without finding the specific button in the dark.

Interesting! This goes to show how the same design feels so different to different users :)

I think I could've gotten used to the touchpad if I spent a lot more time with with the apple-tv/remote, but at the time it felt like a big regression. Compared to the roku remote, i'd lose a mute button, a headphone jack for private listening, and ended up with a touch heavy interface that was more frustrating than useful considering me and wife would pick it up the wrong way a lot. At the end of the day I decided to stick with a Roku and have something that doesn't frustrate my wife, instead of trying to get used to the remote just to have the apple tv interface :)

The Apple TV 4k supports HDMI CEC (and I'd assume the earlier models do too?)

My normal LG TV remote works fine for controlling it

I bought a silicon sleeve[0] for my remote - it makes it much easier to find in the dark, and it makes it really obvious which way is the right way to grab and use it.

I generally use the built in remote app on my iPhone though - it’s accessible from control center, and my phone is usually easier to find than the remote at any given moment.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Generation-Silicone-Controller...

Of all the apple remotes, I liked the old white one because it was tactile and clicky. (although they overloaded too many features on the buttons)

I initially preferred the old, aluminium Apple TV remote when I first got the new one. But now, especially with kids I really appreciate the new one.

- My four year old can search for shows by asking Siri instead of needing to type

- When we're all watching together you can slide your finger over the touch surface to make one of the icons wobble in 3D. It's great when you're asking which episode someone would like to watch, you can highlight and focus the UI for them

- No batteries and charges by lightning. I never had those R2032 batteries for the Aluminium remote whenever it ran out

Agreed on lifting it up the wrong way every time. I bought a few cheap silicon covers for mine in bright colours and it really helps

I had gotten used to my Apple TV remote. Sure, it kinda sucked not being able to instantly orient it but I kind-of got used to that too. Sure, it kinda sucked when I would accidentally brush my finger against the trackpad and do something unintended but I kind-of got used to that too.

But it being made out of glass. What where they thinking?! You know how I orient the Apple TV remote now? My fingers know where the broken glass is on it. Making that out of glass was so beyond a dumb idea that I can't begin to imagine what they were thinking.

The end result is, I love the Apple TV, but I don't know that I'll ever buy another one if the remote continues to be made of glass.

Yes - I wish Apple would just make a TV. Call it a living room screen or a living room monitor or something.

Make it OLED, dumb TV, instant on, Apple TV box plugs in. Separate box with front facing ports that connects to screen with one cable. A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?).

This entire market is in desperate need of someone to make something decent.

The best available option today is LG and it’s still laden with ads and takes a few seconds to boot up.

> A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds

I love that a sibling comment to yours calls out the remote as dealbreaker terrible, but I agree with the sentiment that I would love a remote that was really well-designed.

You can go too far in the other direction too, however. Apple TV remote infamously has no mute functionality. And if you do an internet search on how to mute the Apple TV using the remote (because of course there’s a way, right? No one would design a TV remote that has volume control without mute) you get either one of two answers:

- it’s impossible/difficult to do with current tech (not true)

- the classic Apple forum response of “why would you want to do that?”

This turned into a bit of a rant but I’ll conclude the thought by saying that there’s certainly some sort of happy medium between a gajillion buttons on the remote and lack of absolutely critical functionality. In fact if you invest a bit of extra money into the Sideclick add-on to Apple TV remote you achieve exactly that.

I never use the mute button. I just turn the volume down because I know where that button is without looking.

Personally I find the problem with the apple remote to be the symmetric design (I would have though the puck mouse would have taught that lesson)

I put some gaffer tape on the bottom of my Apple TV remote to make it obvious which end is up. I'm personally not a fan of the touchpad. In principle, it's a decent solution to the problem, but Apple's implementation is somehow not sensitive enough and too sensitive at the same time.

This, it’s like the designers tested it only outdoors.

Who would’ve thought it’s necessary to be able to grab the remote when it’s dark and know what orientation it is in.

I bought some silicon sleeves that fix this issue (the bottom half of the remote face with no buttons is covered by silicon). It also resolve the issue that the remote is very slippery in your hands as well as the issue of being unable to tell which remote goes where if you have multiple Apple TV’s (you can get different color silicon for each TV).

This is a great suggestion, but it is also surprising that it is necessary.

That's why I love the Nvidia Shield remote. It is triangle shaped, and it has accelerometer that lights up the buttons once you grab and move it.

I had to look up a picture because I didn't realize they'd updated the remote at some point. I apparently have a previous generation remote which has all the controls at one end and is pretty usable in the dark. It's sad (but not shocking) to see design usability regress like that.

New versions of the new design have a raised white circle around the menu button which makes it obvious which side is the top (if you couldn’t tell from feeling the trackpad).

People on HN complain about this a lot, but I’ve used it for years and had parents use it without issue. I think it’s a made up problem.

I remember a universal remote that I had on the 90s to control my small bedroom CRT TV. it has only 7 buttons, and had mute button.

I’d probably do something that’s a large dial like an Apple Watch crown for volume that takes up most of a square remote and you push down for mute/unmute.

The other buttons I’d have on it would be power, and input switch.

I’d have an Apple HomePod sound bar which connects to the tv so you don’t have to configure any of that.

Then you’d use the Apple TV remote like normal for everything else. The regular dial remote is just always sitting on the coffee table.

Alternatively they could extend the existing Apple TV remote a bit to add a mute and volume knob or reconfigure to be the one remote for the dumb tv and the Apple TV.

Much as their adware laden TVs drive me crazy, I have to admit that their remote is absolutely amazing. A nice piece of aluminum with a minimum number of buttons, and yet you can control Netflix, Prime, TV etc

Amazon FireTV remote is pretty good, latest gen added a volume control inc. mute button (so you don't need your TV remote). Source switching uses CEC over HDMI. You don't need to point the controller for most tasks as it's Bluetooth. If I had a TV that used CEC I wouldn't need the original remote at all.

What do you think this device would cost? I’m guessing starting around $7999 for 45”

OLEDs are much cheaper than that. Or do you mean an Apple markup?

Look at recent trends in the price of the mac pro, or how much their headphones cost.

Heck, the stand for the mac pro monitor is $999.

A tv is not a Mac Pro.

Look at the price of Mac mini.

> The best available option today is LG and it’s still laden with ads and takes a few seconds to boot up.

Sharp offers (most of) their range as dumb TVs[1]. They still take a few seconds to turn on, but not notably longer than a typical computer monitor.

1. https://sg.sharp/products/tv?filters%5B33%3A36%5D=33%3A36

In the U.S., Sharp TVs aren't actually made by Sharp. They are made by Hisense and then rebranded Sharp. The link you posted is the Singapore site.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sharp-to-americans-you-dont-wan...

> In 2015, Sharp signed a deal with Hisense giving the Chinese company the right to use the Sharp name on TVs sold in the U.S. through 2020.

Hopefully that means there are better options this year?

I had no idea that was a thing, though it's not altogether surprising given where Sharp was back then.

At any rate, according to Google it seems to be over[1] and Sharp took back control in 2019.

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sharp-hisense-idUSKCN1SE1...

> A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?).

I'd prefer the remote as an app on my phone. My desk is covered with remotes. Remotes are so 1980s :-/

You'd prefer it until you try using it. When you want to reduce the volume the last thing you need to do is go looking for the app. Now a watch app, that's something.

On iPhone, there is a built in remote app in control center, then you use the volume buttons on the phone to adjust the TV volume. It’s part of the OS, not the remote app from the App Store, and I’ve found it to be a good fit for those emergency volume adjustments. Sharing so others can benefit from what took me a while to discover :)

For that situation, wouldn't you use voice control? I can say "OK Google mute" in less time than it takes to reach for a remote.

Sure. Assuming your voice assistant works first time. Otherwise the dialog would go a little more like this:

Me OK Google mute

Me> OK...Google....mute

Me> OKGOOGLE mute

G> Sorry, I don't understand

Me> mute...

Me> MUTE MUTE MUTE MUTE MUTE

Me> OKGOOGLE MUTE

G> What would you like to mute?

Me> The TV

Me> Mute the fucking TV Google

Me> OKGOOGLE MUTE THE FUCKING TV

G> Sorry, I don't understand

Me> Fuck it. I should have just looked for the controller to begin with.

This comedy piece usually sends my family into laughter when I try to ask Google Auto to play a song or to call someone.

I end up with some vulgarities and ask my children to do it the old fashioned way (that is to tap the name on their phones, not to use smoke signals)

I stopped wondering where kids pick up vulgarities after I caught myself years ago yelling at a guy in another car.

And we usually end up insulting Alexa as well.

I got into a very similar conversation with Chase's robo call the other day. Went like this:

C: bla bla bla, if you want to speak to a representative say "representative".

Me: representative

C: sorry i couldn't understand, please chose an option or say representative to speak with one

Me: re-pre-sen-ta-tive

C: (same answer as before)

Me: REPRESENTATIVE

C: (same answer as before)

Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF

C: Ok, I'll call a representative

I want to believe that their system either sensed the tension in my voice or saw the expletive and decided to call for adult supervision.

I'm not an native English speaker so I have an accent (which isn't too heavy, but still). Using any form of speech recognition is an instant fuck-show.

The standard polite way to request an agent is: "operator operator fuck fuck fuck"

If I roar "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN" into the phone, this works about 66% of the time.

My HTC One M8 back in the day shipped with a universal remote app that used the built-in IR blaster and it was fantastic. HTC's subsequent discontinuation of that app (and its replacement with a third-party app that was basically useless) is what immediately drove me to never want to buy an HTC product again.

I had that phone too and I vaguely recall that wasn't HTC's decision to cripple the IR but rather the result of HTC infringing someone else's (because naturally someone would have a patent about something as obvious as using a smart phone as an IR remote....)

we measure innovation by the number of patents given, so gotta keep up the statistics

The AppleTV lets you use your iPhone as a remote. I always reach for the physical remote first. The phone remote is just a huge pain — the physical remote just works.

^this. Though I do enjoy having the app as a backup for when I can't find the damn remote and am too lazy to look for it.

Physical remote > any app. By far.

Die apps, die. I want dedicated remotes for lights, stereo, curtains, garage door, and TV.

Apps won’t be around – forget 20 years, 5 years if you’re lucky. A company can disappear along with its stupid fucking app.

About the only advantage an app has is a keyboard.

> A company can disappear along with its stupid fucking app.

Absolutely true, which makes a good argument also for going back to websites and pages (HTML5 helps a lot) instead of the apps business model that basically brought us back to the pre-www era. Also regarding the phone (mis)use as remote, why nobody mentions latency? Every smartphone I tried had an absolutely atrocious UI latency even compared to my 30 years old Amiga 500, why should I want to use it instead of a dedicated device that does the job immediately and I can substitute with 5€, and sometimes even repair?

Hi systemvoltage!

We heard you like remotes, so how about a remote with dedicated, non-reprogrammable buttons to open apps you never use that don't even exist anymore?

Sincerely, Roku

How about arrow keys and an ok button?

     ^
  < OK! >
     v

Maybe one that isn’t tied to a box that stuffs ads in the UI?

> A company can disappear along with its stupid fucking app.

They can also disappear and when you lose your remote, too bad. (That's why remotes go for $$ on ebay.)

Physical remotes are better, particularly if your hands are dirty (like during eating). A physical remote can be used easily without looking at it and it can be cleaned later easily too. Though it's also true that a lot of remotes are difficult to handle.

What we need might actually be a single remote for everything.

I'd argue the opposite: in my experience, a uniform glass surface is a lot easier to clean (and avoid getting dirty in the first place) than some bumpy surface with crevices into which crumbs inevitably sneak in.

Re: a single remote for everything, the term for that is "universal remote", and not once have I been satisfied with one due to the difficulty and fragility of programming it. Maybe in this day and age we can finally make that programming dead simple and robust; Logitech came close with its universal remote from years ago, but even that still wasn't quite easy enough to setup and use to fully replace all my remotes. That HDMI-CEC or whatever it's called also comes close, but it's restricted to HDMI, obviously leaving non-HDMI devices in the dust.

A lot of the responses disagree. I generally prefer physical remotes, but a touchscreen remote could be pretty sweet for very complex systems (think whole-room/whole-house systems that integrate A/V with lighting, HVAC, etc.) if implemented well. But the whole interaction model with phones and apps is just... wrong for this usecase. The delays, the many swipes and taps just to get to the right screen, the delays, waiting for the app to load and connect to the network, and also the delays.

I've been meaning to hack an old phone to be an instant-on remote with some custom software, but there are always dozens of higher priority projects. If anyone wants to hire/partner with me to build such a thing though...

Logitech's line of Harmony remotes were (are?) great for this. Physical buttons, programmable sequences, and a touch screen.

But have you even seen an app that remained paired to any piece of hardware whatsoever for more than a few minutes?

Using any form of technology? Without dropping one side or the other into an irreparable state that requires power cycling one or both ends at least once and then hoping for the best?

It’d be cool if it worked, by my expectation is that it’ll be implemented by the guy in charge of that YouTube “cast” app that has only theoretically worked one time in a lab in Palo Alto.

I had an app on my Palm Pilot for that, it was really reliable but it was annoying to light up if I was watching something in the dark. One nice thing was that the (rechargeable) battery was always charged up, unlike the physical remote which seemed to be dead more often than it should have been.

Google is adding a “dumb TV mode,” but I’m skeptical.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-best-feature-of-...

Presumably will still boot slowly and only the topmost UI layer loads differently, and until they confirm otherwise I’m guessing that even with a simplified UI it still includes all the creepy tracking of everything you watch.

I would imagine people would conflate "dumb tv" with privacy (sort of like "incognito"), when google doesn't actually say that.

How will they track you though, some sort of real time content id of everything you watch? Is there any evidence that they do this? If it’s in dumb tv mode and the display stream is coming from a separate device like an Apple TV then it seems much less trivial to track you than if you’re using the builtin smart features.

Yes, they’re basically all doing this. “Automatic Content Recognition,” called various things by the different brands, lets them know what you’re watching even if it’s coming from another device over HDMI instead of using the TV’s apps.

https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

Android TV might not build it in, but much like android phones, you get extra “features” from pretty much every OEM.

> Is there any evidence that they do this?

Evidence is a high bar. But I can tell you my f...ing smart tv asks me on behalf of tv stations to accept cookies when I switch to some german tv stations. Yes, I'd say they are tracking what I am watching. That is with TV over satellite in Germany.

As much as I want this to happen. And I have been advocating for it [1] for many years. The more I read into the whole TV, display panel and electronic industry the grimmer it is for such Apple TV set to exist.

An Apple branded TV, even if it is without the TV part or just a monitor would have to be at least 2-3x the price of today's similar TV sets. And if anything OP were only willing to paid an extra $100 is probably why Apple didn't make one.

Some of the TV in the industry isn't just on Low Margin. They are entering negative margin territory if you are discounting Data Selling and software / partner sponsorship.

Unless the cost electronic part continue to raise to the point where Apple has an advantage with their SoC.

I think one of their original purpose or intention for ProXDR was the use the Dual Layer LCD technology to create something like a true Reference Display Monitor. But the technology and cost never got to that point. At least I hope they could continue their investment in that area even if they do not intend it to be in consumer usage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710734

The thing is, Apple could charge 2-3x, because the prices have gotten so cheap.

People would absolutely pay $1000-1200 for a 55" Apple TV with nice software, and maybe a nice brushed aluminum frame that looks nice on the wall.

(For comparison, the cheapest 55" I could quickly find from a major retail is around $300, with a "name brand" starting around $400).

they were talking about OLEDs, so 3000-5000 would be a more realistic estimate with that markup.

...and that would only play Apple content.

The Apple TV plays content from other providers just fine.

I've got a 3rd generation apple TV, which is EOL and apps are being slowly discontinued (no disney, youtube is going soon)

However I can still watch Disney on it using airplay from my OG iphone SE (2016). As far as consumer electronics go, apple is well ahead of the pack.

Why would it be 2 or 3 times more? Apple phones are between 10 and 15 times the price of the cheapest Android alternatives (iPhone 12 $999 from Apple, Samsung Galaxy A01 $55 from Amazon). Apple could, and probably would, sell a $4000 television.

Which puts it in spitting distance of some of the highest end Samsung TVs (or short throw projectors) anyway.

(Samsung LSP7 is $3,500)

2x to 3x at a comparable model on Hardware level.

What? Just no, that's like how a Vespa moped an alternative to a Porsche car?

The $300 TV that you found probably has poor audio, viewing angle, contrast ratio, support, etc. From the limited research I did before buying my TV, a 55" TV with good reviews for panel and sound quality that you can rely on for 5-10 years costs C$1,200 today.

Good sound probably requires a sound bar. I'm not sure the physics of flat panel TVs allows for great sound quality. Getting a sound bar went from me mostly using my wall mounted TV as a digital picture frame (which was my primary thinking when I bought it) to actually being the TV I use for streaming most of the time.

5-10 years? I know I'm not on the latest technology step. But 4K isn't worth me upgrading perfectly functional TVs. Maybe if we get to reasonably priced OLED panels but I'm not in a big hurry to upgrade TVs that are working.

You can get a 55” TCL QLED 4K TV for around $500 - Amazon currently has them for $534, I paid $460 a few months back. All the specs are amazing, as is the software - minimal, intuitive, and effective. And the sound is actually rather impressive out of the box, but if you want any low frequencies you need bigger external speakers that cannot physically fit in a flatscreen TV.

I actually took home quite a few (3-4) more expensive TVs from Costco before buying the TCL, and it was far and away the best set while also being 1/2 to 1/3 the price.

I'd say 1500 dollar TV is a viable purchase given that a TV has a life of 15+ years as against to 1000 dollar iphone or any other mobile which actually has a life of may be 4-5 years.

It would be the best of Apple product to show off.

Agreed - Apple could easily charge 3-5k. The LG TVs I mentioned cost that much.

They could offer three sizes. Mini, Normal, Max.

They could use it as a jumping off point to own the “living room” if they wanted.

All OLED TV, including non LG OLED currently ships about 5M unit per year. The volume of those high price range OLED are tiny in total shipping volume.

And if that specific LG model charges 3 to 5K, Apple will have to sell it at 6 to 10K.

I don’t think so - Apple has a better supply chain, more committed users, more scale, etc.

There is only one OLED TV display panel maker. That is LG.

Edit: I think I need to spell things out a little more clearly. If Apple were to use OLED and aim at a top tier market, then it would be competing directly with LG TV, which also happens to be gaining momentum in terms of both OLED display panel ( LG Display ) and TV set ( LG Electronics ). LG Display will also need to built new Fab for Apple. The recent expansion at Guangzhou doubling their capacity, AFAIK has already been booked and has no relation to Apple. i.e LG has little interest to do it with Apple given they are already fully booked on capacity. And Apple doesn't seems to be interested in pushing LG to partner.

The answer to if Apple could do something will always going to be yes given they have hundreds of billions of cash and has little idea what to do with it other than buying back stocks.

The answer to if Apple will do it is always going to complex. And nothing in the supply chain and BOM cost analysis suggest it is a good strategy worth going for.

I do wish Apple prove wrong though.

The best option that I know of today (in terms of resulting usabilty and long term reliability) is using a dumb computer monitor and roll the rest yourself with a Raspi.

While this option is certainly not available to all, it is the only thing that will really fit your needs. I completely gave up on finding anything decent in that market.

The best for who? This is a ridiculous take, nobody wants to roll their own TV UX except HN users looking for a weekend project.

What usability / long-term reliability perk does your own software running on a RPI have over an Apple TV plugged into a dumb TV / monitor?

I know plenty of folks who run kodi.

I would say not "hn user" level folks, more like "i have a gaming pc".

This comment is a part of why TV sucks so hard - ridiculous users.

Everyone's idea of 'simple' is rather asinine, unimaginative.

The latest Pis come practically preinstalled with everything, just have to load Kodi.

But someone who has found 'their' solution i.e. some crap by Apple e.g. assumes this is how everything should be... And we all get stuck with crappy 'smart' TVs (or don't own one - I have survived 10+ years without a TV - absolutely nothing about TVs today makes me want one. So much hot garbage)

In my experience getting Kodi set up is a massive time sink, to the point that the programmer time needed to set it up would easily double the total cost of a typical home theater setup. Admittedly my experience with it is a few years out of date, but a quick search for incredibly basic functionality like running the big streaming services makes it clear that this hasn’t really changed. On top of most of them being limited to 720p, it looks like the canonical solution nowadays is to run them in Chrome from Kodi, which (1) phones home to Google, unlike an Apple TV and (2) necessitates a mouse or other pointing device since you can’t rely on “keyboard” navigation with a remote - this alone would be a dealbreaker for me.

The best for me obviously. I was the one who made the comment and declaring an object "the best" of any category is always a subjective statement.

My own solution has the pros:

- I control precisely what I need and what not, both in terms of features and in terms of usability

- I control when it gets changed/updated

- I control which data flows in and out of the system

- Your device is not a brick when the manufacturer decides to end the support or shuts down the wrong server

The obvious downside is that it means work and requires a certain set of skills. Whether it is worth it or not depends on how important that thing is for you and how much all the TVs suck at doing what you want in the way you want it done.

Or just buy a smart TV and just never connect it to the internet.

That doesn't stop it from spending a minute trying at every boot, or from using a cellular whispernet.

Are the graphics on a Raspi really that good?

A Raspi 4 can run two 4k HDMI streams at once. What do you mean?

The Raspberry Pi 4 can drive 4k displays and easily run Kodi[0].

[0]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/build-the-ultimate-4k-home-...

Full-screen Streaming is much less compute intensive than rendering and compositing.

Does this cause issues with HDCP2?

They can't. They already used up the name 'Apple TV' for another of their products (which oddly enough doesn't actually seem to be a TV at all).

Apple TV Pro Max

“For another” sounds singular. Was that intentional? It’s already got a plurality of meanings

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21438152

> I wish Apple would just make a TV.

But that would be a TV which you can't use to watch adult content. And Netflix and HBO would be 30% more expensive.

And yet I can do all of that on my iPad without extra cost.

And cast it to a TV using Chromecast and/or Apple TV. I basically never use the "smart TV" features on my TV.

To be fair tvs are a very low margin product and without the ads it would be profitless for anyone but apple (or another manufacturer that sold as a premium to avoid ads). I don't know how big the market for that is, personally I'm happy with a dumb tv connected to a video game console that has all my streaming services.

To be fair, TVs are a decades old market that have paid off great for many companies and they didn’t have ads until recently.

i can't help but think it is like bundleware and the PC, which would subsidize the cost of the system, maybe by $50.

same thing is happening with TVs. This crap subsidizes the price of the TV, so then the $279 tv looks more attractive than the more expensive tvs without ads/tracking/data gathering (which then disappear)

TVs used to much more expensive, and they only became cheap when TV manufacturers realized there’s a ton of money to be made by selling your personal information. A manufacturer that doesn’t do this would not be competitively priced I’m afraid.

“Why TVs Have Become So Inexpensive“ => https://youtu.be/NWwawTnT7LM

I don’t agree with this video. I bought a 55” plasma for $800 over 10 years ago. And I bought a Sony Triniton for $1000 around 2000. The price of TVs seems to be fixed around this price point and we seem to get more features, bigger screens, etc and the price stays about the same.

The highest end TVs I see also have ads. So I don’t think this factors into the price at all. It’s just bonus profits on top of existing profits.

If ad data subsidized prices significantly, I wouldn’t expect it in $4,000 TVs. Am I supposed to believe that the TV would be $4,050 without ads? It seems strange that high end TVs would care about these small amounts.

I think this is just a cover story by marketers to garner sympathy.

I have been using an Apple TV and a Chromecast for a long time.

I've never seen an ad on the Chromecast - it simply plays a stream as instructed by an app on the phone. Is it different with the Fire Stick?

The Chromecast does some gross shit. You see it in Pihole if you force it to route its dns through the Pihole.

It has some black magic whereby it ignores local dns setting as far as I can tell. I blocked port 53 at firewall and sent it back to a Pihole.

Good times.

> I blocked port 53 at firewall and sent it back to a Pihole

Im betting my savings this is far from enough, its Google sw, they smart AF. Send that thing back to where you bought it better :)

Better melt it down just to be sure :)

I don’t think it’s black magic. They just do DNS over HTTPS.

At the rate things are going you're likely going to want to just blackhole all of the public DNS-over-https providers[0] to ensure that it's not switching to DoH to get around your rules.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/roycewilliams/dd13c8f4a3371a57f8dd82...

The non-Apple equivalent is the Nvidia Shield TV. Excellent piece of hardware that gives you access to basically every streaming app, plus integrates with Android's casting setup.

Also fun fact, the Shield TV is the longest supported Android device in existence

(https://www.androidauthority.com/nvidia-shield-tv-25th-updat...)

> Android

I wouldn’t trust the world’s biggest tracking company not to track me.

You’re kind of moving laterally there. (From trusting Smart TV to trusting Google.)

Are ads on firestick a US only thing or have I been blind to not notice any ads in my firestick?

The only ads I see are the banners, but I don't pay any attention to those. There aren't any video ads, which is all I really care about.

(My dumb TV is a projector, one of the best decisions we've made in the past 5 years.)

Which projector did you go with?

What kind of ads do you have on the fire stick?

I am curious because in France at least there is only the top banner on the home screen, which I do not even see as I directly jump into an app.

You know you are tracked, right? It's just all the tracking information goes to one big monopolist instead of multiple providers. This may make it feel as if there is less tracking going on but it really isn't.

You can adjust the privacy settings so that you’re not tracked: https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/adjust-privacy-settings-a...

Beyond Apple, you should expect individual Apple TV apps to track by default.

I agree that you are still being tracked on an Apple TV, but that's because the YouTube app is still made by Google, and the Netflix app is made by Netflix, etc.

Apple probably has some sort of tracking system, but they're hardly a tracking monopolist, not even on their own devices.

apple still tracking you. i like the fire tv because you can side load apps that aren't in the store. great for us hackers.

> We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place.

If we're talking about the original, non-4k Fire TV Stick, then yes. The 4k version is speedy, but still laden with ads.

I recently purchased a Roku Streaming Stick Plus ($39 USD on Amazon — that's ~20% the price of an Apple TV) because I found out that they natively supported AirPlay 2. If you're looking for an ad-free experience, VPN out to an unsupported country and create a Roku account there. You'll be able to add less "channels", but Roku also stops trying to hard-sell you on subscriptions.

Vizio's CTO confirmed in 2019 that smart TV data harvesting subsidizes their prices: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/7/18172397/airplay-2-homekit...

This is how a 70in TV at $499 is possible

Lets DD-WRT them

Not surprising. Every time my Vizio TV downloads an update, it "forgets" that I've opted out of all the tracking and phone-homeing

do you get prompted again to opt-in, or does it start collecting data until you opt-out again?

That’s weird how Vizio TVs haven’t dropped in price once ads started “subsidizing” their prices.

I think he means that without ads they wouldn’t make as much so they would have to charge more to make the same amount of money they would with ads (which is the same they used to make).

The best thing about smart TV's is they are cheaper than otherwise and you can dumb them by not connecting them to wifi/internet. Just add in your own NUC running linux and you have the best of both worlds. Get a logitech mx ergo as the "remote control" and you're good to go.

They're still taking extra time to boot up an OS and using electricity to track what you're doing. There have also been stories on HN about smart TVs connecting to open wifi to send data home.

I just bought the TV I wanted and never connected it to the internet, never ran the "setup". I use an AppleTV 4K which has all the streaming apps you want (Netflix, Amazon, BBC, Pluto, etc.). For local media I use an application called MrMC ($6.99) which is a Kodi port to the AppleTV that allows you to mount Samba/NFS (https://mrmc.tv). MrMC even supports using a SQL backend for keeping track of your media (like Kodi). I just run it in on a jail in my TrueNAS setup. Every TV is the same, every time someone starts MrMC everything is in sync. Nice and simple.

FWIW, one of the majors complaints is that many of these devices will actively, without prompting search for and connect to open wifi.

I’ve heard this mentioned on HN a few times; is there any documented case of this actually happening?

Some stuff a year ago. It was confirmed by others at the time (after testing) though didn’t seem to get picked up by news outlets.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

Anecdotally I have 6 Samsung TVs hung on my office wall for monitoring, which run the Tizen OS and the nag screens about connecting to a network and accepting the ToS make the units a little annoying to work with. (But it’s not as bad as to say I wouldn’t use the thing). It wouldn’t surprise me if they were scanning for open Wi-Fi. I might test it out, but we’re surrounded by free Wi-Fi which has captive portals, so it’s effectively black holed.

This Reddit post is not proof as no one has been able to replicate this. This internet lore until there is repeatable proof.

Hmm, weird, I use a 50" Samsung 4k TV as my "monitor" (I'm not much of a gamer so a lower refresh rate is fine for coding and watching YouTube), and I never set up my WiFi and I don't think I accepted any Terms of Service, and it doesn't nag me, but granted literally the only video data that's been displayed on the TV has been an HDMI input and the color-correction menu. Maybe different models of Samsung TVs do things differently?

Or firmware versions

Crack open the set and ground the antenna? Idk, I’m tempted to find a nice model and figure out an adapter to go from eDP to the panel’s actual interface.

>never connected it to the internet

Which is all fine and dandy but if you've bought a fancy new TV with bleeding edge features for use with your next-gen console, like low-latency gaming mode, HDMI 2.1 4K/120Hz, dolby atmos, etc, it can all comes apart when you realize you need a firmware update that fixes a bug with said bleeding edge features, since a lot of consumer HW these days is rushed out the factory door with their firmware partly unfinished and the expectation that a day-one patch will be available once the HW gets to consumers and the manufacturer has had more time for testing.

What then?

Even on TVs from over 10 years ago you could update the FW offline by plugging in a USB drive with the FW binary you would download from the manufacturer's website but now your only option is to keep the TV online and have it pull the updates itself, often unencrypted from some often unsecure CDN server while it sends telemetry data back to the mothership about your usage patterns.

I know I'll have to miss out on the next-gen features for a while but you can count me out from the shit-show that is smart TVs.

well, with the "white-label" TVs mentioned in the article you don't have this problem, because they don't even have these features.

Said that, the advertised brand just looks like the usual bottom of the barrel chinese TV set. And these usually have substantially worse specs than what you get from NEC and Co. for around 25% more than the equivalent TV (viewing angles, coating and brightness come to mind in a conference room application).

Connect it, update the firmware, disconnect it.

It’s useful to a separate SSID for smart-TV like devices. You can randomly update the passwords (to execute the disconnect it step) without annoying everyone else in the house.

>Connect it, update the firmware, disconnect it.

If your original intent of having it air-gapped in the first place was for privacy and security then doing what you said would be like saying:

remove condom, have intercourse, put back condom :D

My main reason is to neuter ad delivery.

The problem with this approach is that once you hook it up online for the first time, ads can be cookied and still displayed once it goes offline.

I mean.....I have the top of the line LG CX TV and it can be updated from a USB stick. I honestly have no idea why you'd leave it unplugged though, the OS is super fast, starts up instantly and it has all the apps I need, plugging in another device just to watch Netflix seems super wasteful.

There are 2 paths:

1. Connect it, allow it to update, disconnect it. If any local “ads” pop up, do a factory reset which will wipe all the cached data.

2. Most devices allow you to update firmware from a file via USB. Just get the file which is only the firmware and update that way.

I'm a bit worried about the TV having some kind of internal clock set in the factory configured to throw an undismissible prompt after a year or two because your firmware 'expired' and you need security updates to keep your internet connected device that is not connected to the internet safe.

You won't know if the TV has such a feature until someone encounters it years after the device is first sold.

Couldn’t you just change the date back a few years in that case? Why do you need an accurate date on the TV?

How would you change the date if you can't get around the prompt?

Sorry, I missed the part about the dialog being undismissable. I assumed they were talking about a nag screen.

I don’t think a non-dismissable dialog would be legal unless they clearly sold the TV as “Internet connection required”.

I recently bought a new TV and did a little searching for dumb TVs before buying. It’s really hard to find a dumb TV. I learned that you can in fact buy a commercial TV that is dumb which seems like a good option.

I ended up going with a smart enabled Samsung TV and have not enabled the TV to access wifi. It wants me to agree to terms and conditions whenever I pull up the main menu. I’ve learned to ignore it but it has asked at least once without good reason to access wifi.

I did much the same and ultimately came to the conclusions that:

1) The remaining consumer options are on the low to mediocre end of the spectrum and don't have great picture

2) The commercial options are more expensive with mediocre picture, as they're intended for digital signage (24/7 full brightness), not movies.

Yeah those are the reasons I went with the smart TV kept offline. It’s a bummer that TVs now come with terms and conditions designed to monetize you and even though you own the thing you can’t control it.

This may be tinfoil-hat adjacent, but I have heard that the allure of advertising data is so high that TV manufacturers will program their software to connect to any open WiFi network in order to deliver their collected data.

By the way, your post is basically the article, except they mention Sceptre TVs, who specialize in making dumb tv panels.

If you connect to a black hole Arduino AP is it smart enough to detect that and roam to an open Wifi network?

Yes.

I mean, "smart enough" is "can I phone home? no? try other wifi" which is pretty darn simple to build. Even by accident.

So I advertised sceptre TVs here last year about this time. I’ve had one for a year now and I do not recommend it. The color recreation is garbage, lots of glare, poor upscaling, and basically it’s everything you would expect out of a $200 55” tv (or $380 75”, they are stupid cheap) . Also my TV has a line of dead pixels and sceptre seems to have forgotten about my RMA.

While I won’t replace it with an LG Cx series oled, I won’t be ashamed to pickup a hisense or Samsung when I eventually rage quit this trash

It’s worth noting that they sell very high-peice dumb TVs for over 2000$ as well now, so I’d expect those to have pretty amazing panels built in.

At that point it's time to open the thing up and rip out the antenna.

At some point, it becomes time to pass draconian laws against consumer-hostile practices like phoning home other than to perform the intended function of a product or forcing updates that change behaviour in adverse or unwanted ways.

I am reasonably sure that point is already behind us, but politicians are not exactly known for their tech savvy and timely regulation of tech industry.

You can't legislate morals.

What else is worth legislating? If it was in the manufacturer's short-sighted selfish interest, they'd do it. For everything else, there's customer action and legal action.

It's being done all the time, and it's exactly what legislation is for. Workers rights, consumer protection, EPA, outlawing child labor and slaves, etc.

There is already the GDPR, but it lacks sufficient enforcement.

This is a very relevant read (PDF): https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Ot...

Interesting report, thanks for sharing it. I think there are other significant dangers in this area beyond those it covers, but promoting a better approach to privacy and to security updates after purchase would at least be two significant steps in the right direction.

Have you seen the size of the antenna in your cell phone?

You're never gonna find all the antennas inside a product the size of a television. Some will be part of the circuit boards.

A possible alternative, at least for people inclined to a more cinematic watching experience (which has its pros and cons), is to buy a projector.

A projector also makes an excellent second monitor, again pros and cons.

Don't know if they are widely available or available anymore but the last time I bought a TV, I got a commercial display for digital signage which had no smart tv features. It just had a bunch of HDMI/av inputs which I used with game consoles/android TV box. The screen is not as great as latest TVs for home use.

Could you just do a computer monitor? They have an HDMI port so they will show anything you want. Downsides: no tuner. Not a problem if you don’t need one. No remote control. Maybe not much of a downside if you’re just watching using a streaming box. No sound. Not a problem if using a sound bar.

Seems a worthy idea if you’re concerned about tracking, but I don’t see this idea around so I must be missing a downside.

Yeah that would probably work for smaller needs but haven’t seen monitors at 65” and higher range

Dell sells at least 75" monitors. They do cost 10x as much as a similar size smart TV from Walmart though.

I'm sure i sound like a luddite but why does anyone need a 65" screen.

No one needs a TV at all so that argument is pointless.

Do people need a 15" computer monitor?

If instead of a chair-desk-monitor you're sitting at a couch 5 times further from the screen, the equivalent screen size is 5 times larger, so 75" for the equivalent of what a 15" monitor gives you at your desk.

Meanwhile to sit somewhere where a 75" TV in my living room takes up a corresponding field of view to my 27" PC monitor I think I'd need to knock a few walls and sit in my neighbours

Backwards. Not sure if it's the square of the distance but you do need more than double the size at twice the distance.

I am using a 65 inch dumb Samsung pc screen together with a Nvidia shield. 3 years ago I bought the screen for 1000 bucks. Nvidia shield remote also works with the screen and stereo tuner. For my it's the perfect setup. Rooted the shield to get rid of all non essential crap. No ads. Very fast. And Plex,Kodi, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify working perfectly.

I picked up a 40” Sceptre “dumb tv” for $150 on Black Friday and added a Google TV Chromecast. The TV itself just does the bare minimum: turn on/off, sound higher/lower. Everything else is controlled by Google TV. By far my best purchase of the year.

I quite like our Google TV Chromecast too (I think that's the name, the new one with the remote). Our old Samsung from 2013 had a lot of issues, Netflix would stall a lot, and Disney Plus never even released an app for it.

Turns out it wasn't the WiFi like we suspected, the TV was apparently just poorly coded junk. It's smooth playing on the new device (apart from the time it crashed and needed a reboot). My only complaint is that it associated with my YouTube account but it's a shared TV, so the main screen has watching suggestions based on what I have personally watched and I cannot 'log out' of YouTube alone. This is annoying, but it's Google, so what is privacy? I guess I can make a new account.

Some people upgrade to a new TV as often as every two/three years. You just need to find them on gumtree just before christmas. Thats how I got my big dumb LG.

Consumers no longer own their devices. Companies decide which code runs on them, and of course they choose code that makes them money.

There really is no reason to couple two functions (displaying images, selecting and playing content) in a single device. It's an antipattern for resilient and serviceable systems.

At least for the time being it's still possible to keep TVs off the internet and bypass this garbage. I've got a 2020 Sony and have never seen an ad on it.

I'm expecting these days are numbered though; some combination of ethernet-over-HDMI, Amazon Sidewalk, built-in 5G antennas, or just straight up refusing to work without a network connection feels like it's just a couple years away.

Imagine a TV that must be connected to the internet at all times being hacked so that it only plays educational videos about the evils of Smart TV's 24/7.

There's a good Darknet Diaries podcast episode about Hacker Giraffe, a guy who hacked 50,000 open printers to tell the owners their devices were exposed.

Way, way, way back in the day there was a tool called Simba and a search engine that you could use to find tons of music, etc. that would open download links in the Simba app. Turns out, that was just an SMB client connecting to open Windows shares.

I cannot seem to find it now, but I read couple years back something about TV manufacturers considering embedding a cell and sim card SoC into these smart TV's for exactly this reason.

That would be 5G iot stuff. Sort of like wifi you don't own.

> built-in 5G antennas, or just straight up refusing to work without a network connection feels like it's just a couple years away

Tesla cars now.

Coincidentally, Google just announced a "basic TV" mode, although we don't know what TVs will ship with this feature. https://9to5google.com/2021/02/24/google-tv-basic-tv-mode/

Maybe Framework's next product should be a dumb TV, perhaps based on the latest LG OLED panels.

It was on the long list of product categories we explored from a distance for our roadmap. It's not a category we're going to enter any time soon, but we did at least get a blog post out of it!

In addition to not having the ecosystem network effects from modules and upgrades that notebooks (our first category) have, TVs are extremely difficult logistically. You need to be able to get really great financing terms and freight rates to be able to have huge thousand dollar objects sitting on boats, trains, and trucks for weeks at a time.

Roku TVs have had this from the start. When you first setup (or factory reset) the TV, you can choose to not connect it to a network. In that state, neither WiFi or Ethernet are routable, so no data leaves the TV. The TV does broadcast a private WifI network used for pairing RF remotes. Roku releases USB updates for the TVs periodically, usually a little while after a major release has been released over the network to all units, but those updates usually aren't needed for unconnected use unless there's some issue with OTA reception or HDMI that were found in the field.

As an avid TV show consumer, people regularly asks me why am I still using my 10 years old 32" Panasonic. Well, not only it still works as day one, so why would I get rid of a perfectly working piece of tech, also I'm not sure a bigger screen will improve my consumer experience. Having a nVidia Shield and Plex setup, what would be the point of having a smart TV since I've already got everything a smart TV do and even better. 4K UHD ? Legally or not, there is so limited content available in more than 1080p at that moment that it wouldn't makes sense to upgrade now. Also with new TV it seems that you have to take care of framerate profiles, HDR and whatnot. I just want to watch The Office for the 200th time, I don't care about that and I don't want to.

I remember when I bought my TV, the salesmen were trying to make me buy a 3D TV since it was the hype at that time. But I was certain that 3D was no for me, that it wasn't going to last and a 3D TV will cost me more than a 2D. So I just looked at images on the screens in the shops and finaly I said : "this one", without knowing anything about it except that I felt satisfied with how the images were rendered. It appeared that not only it wasn't a 3D TV but also it wasn't, by far, the cheapest one. The 3D ones they were trying to sell me were actually cheaper than the one I picked. I don't know if the salesman got a better % on the sell, but me I was and still am very satisfied with my choice !

Smart TV is not a trend like 3D was, it will definitely stay so unfortunately I don't see how better it can be in the future since people want cheap TV, and even if some manufacturers offers dumb TV, they will cost more than the smart ones so it will never a huge success.

Huge "dumb tv" proponent here I've had an nvidia shield for years and it checks all the boxes for me. It runs android and from what I know, it's one of the most well supported android devices period in terms of consistent updates. Here's why I love it:

- I have access to the play store for apps, not some proprietary tv manufacturer subset of poorly developed apps. That means I can install the retroarch/plex/etc android apps directly from play.

- It has built in google assistant which I use every day to play music and yt videos (as well as controlling other stuff in my all-google house.

- Thanks to CEC, if I say "hey google play [artist] videos on shield" it will turn on the shield, which will turn on my TV, which will turn on my stereo. I never have to touch buttons if I want to listen to music.

- Because it's android TV, I can clear my homescreen of everything but the app launchers I use - no ads, no suggestions, no junk apps.

- It has a really cool feature that lets you stream 4k from a PC with an nvidia card. I added the rdp exe as a "game" that I can stream so I stream my office desktop to my living room tv to browse reddit and check emails and stuff. (This is probably one of the most incomparable features)

- It has 2 usb ports. I use one for retroarch roms and the other one for a logitech wireless kb with a touch pad (which is great for when I'm streaming my desktop but also when I need to enter a password or something.

- you can pair any controller with it but I've used the nvidia controller that came with it to play a bunch of n64 and snes games all the way through on retro arch.

My TV is stupid and I like it that way. As far as I'm concerned, the shield is my TV's os

> - I have access to the play store for apps, not some proprietary tv manufacturer subset of poorly developed apps. That means I can install the retroarch/plex/etc android apps directly from play.

> - It has built in google assistant which I use every day to play music and yt videos (as well as controlling other stuff in my all-google house.

You're not getting it. The whole point is to avoid constant tracking. If you have Google services, you're being tracked.

The point is to get to choose the experience you want, and if you want the simplicity of having an Android box connected to your dumb Tv, that’s a-ok. If you want to go kore custom and just have a raspi with plex on it, that’s great, too.

The problem with smart TVs is that they force tracking and ads upon you, with little to no options of opting out.

The problem with Google is that they force tracking and ads upon you, with little to no options of opting out.

You don’t know what background processes are running on an Nvidia Shield, do you?

I do, I’m just saying not everybody cares. And one may care even less when there’s no ads to be seen.

This resonates with me. Recently my Samsung "smart" TV decided that after I turned off an input device, the appropriate behaviour was to immediately display some garbage "entertainment" channel called cheddar. I think it's what is played at gas station pumps?

The day that happened is the day my TV lost internet privilages (wifi is turned off) and we started just using a chromecast for all the "smart" functionalities.

> Recently my Samsung "smart" TV decided that after I turned off an input device, the appropriate behaviour was to immediately display some garbage "entertainment" channel called cheddar.

This could be the opening line from a near-future dystopian novel.

Ahhh the joys of Samsung TV Plus - one of the most irritating "features" that they've added to sets in all my years of providing tech support for them.

I've listed a few ways to disable TV plus at : https://factory-reset.com/wiki/Samsung_TV_Plus - without having to disable the other smart features on your set by disabling the internet connection.

This is yet another proof that advertising is a cancer on society and should be kept in check by regulation otherwise it ends up taking over everything including paid products and pushes ad-free products out of the market.

> Incredibly, Samsung even recommends that you run virus and malware checking on your TV regularly.

Given its constant ambient speech scanning, Samsung also recommends that you leave the room if you want to have a private conversation. This makes me very, very angry.

Source?

https://www.cnet.com/news/samsungs-warning-our-smart-tvs-rec...

> If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search. At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.

That seems normal, not like persistent background recording.

Last time this topic came up, I asked about the idea of a company producing dumb TV. I know a number of “normal” people who don’t particularly care for internet connectivity in anything so I was curious why no one was doing it, at least not with the sizes and resolutions you see on top of the line TVs.

Apparently the margins on commodity hardware like TVs are too small. Someone did bring up and interesting idea of running a batch released product based on something like a Kickstarter though.

The article mentions Sceptre TV, which is doing just that.

These displays exist now. "Digital Information Displays".

Example search here: https://www.cdw.com/Search/computer-monitors-displays/large-...

Looks like you can't check out without an account, but I'm sure you could find a shop that would sell you one.

Here is a basic one: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1242029-REG/samsung_3...

It looks like since I last checked the "smart" is creeping in, but these are designed to "accept input, and display it" so it's as close as we can get without custom manufacturing.

If I understand correctly that these are all roughly comparable TVs as far as the viewing is concerned, the comparison at https://www.bestbuy.com/site/compare?skus=6406418,6325571,64... really highlights that the smart features subsidize the TV!

Thanks for the link. They're not nearly as expensive as I thought they'd be.

A Samsung at 55 inches for $600 is perfect for my needs.

So much for the lie about TVs need ads to keep the price reasonable.

These kinds of displays are not really calibrated to present television and cinema video content. Watching long-form visual media on these kinds of displays could be a frustrating experience - at least, these have been my prior results.

Is there any reason that this wouldn't be solved by spending an hour with a colorimeter? Do these displays not expose any calibration controls?

though if you just compare specs and ad-copy, you can just get a one designed for indoors and control room applications. Which behaves like a typical TV priced around 20-30% below. At least this seems true for the samsung lineup, which roughly looked like "cheapest option (for sure not worse than their awful 350$ TVs) < 24/7, medium brightness (got that and it's super nice in a bright living room, also non "calibration" issues ) < high end, QLED" - this mirrors their "normal" lineup very closely and I think economies of scale dictate that they won't use custom panels (as indicated by their yearly update of this bland, simple to understand lineup) so I guess these won't be any worse than what you get in a TV. Backlights are obviously not tuned for super-highend-HDR, but I don't think people here complaining about ads are in the market for that and full sRGB is pretty ok on a device which just works (no banding, no ads, no "image-improvement" algos in the background).

Any manufacturer could release a dumb model at a higher price and advertise it as such.

While I let my smart TV connect to the internet for firmware update reasons (bug fixes), I’m running my entire home network through NextDNS, and before that a PiHole. Not seeing any ads in the UI, and I note some attempted logging traffic is blocked.

Before I upgraded to LG last year I had a Samsung and it was trying to ping home constantly. It constituted 80% of outbound requests denied by the PiHole

In this arms race, these companies might start shipping with their own resolver.

You can work around this by either setting a fake gateway in a static IP configuration, or configuring your DHCP server to give a fake gateway to requests coming from the TV's MAC address.

By "fake gateway" I mean a non-existing IP on your LAN: that way, no outgoing request from the offending MAC address will ever get out to the public Internet.

> work around this by either setting a fake gateway in a static IP configuration ...

Take it to backyard and axe it to pieces. Just to be sure.

It's already mentioned in this thread: built in IoT. There are IoT vendors that have roaming agreements worldwide; typically you stick these things on containers or other mobile assets. They call home whenever they can.

For an actual arms race, we need vendors on the consumer side front to create beautiful Faraday Cages for "your" home appliances.

My smart TV will update the firmware via USB. Other than the fact that it's a 1.5 GB download [1], it's quick and easy.

[1] There's a couple 4k test videos in the system menu, which I guess is some of the hugeness. Seems crazy though.

Out of interest - Why do you use both a PiHole and NextDNS?

I removed my PiHole once I got NextDNS as it just seemed redundant.

I have a similar setup at home: local AdGuardHome deployment with NextDNS as the upstream. I have several NextDNS configurations and AdGuardHome's upstream is one that has no filters. I use other profiles with filters when I am on the go.

I can't install NextDNS client on a lot of devices like a robot vacuum. Sure you can configure NextDNS to be the resolver on the gateway, but then the gateway becomes the only client in your NextDNS logs and you can't figure out which device is downloading Google ads, which makes the log useless. It is also easier to temporarily disable filters -- changing DNS on some routers may need a rebooting, which causes downtime on the whole home network.

The only thing you can do with NextDNS logs is looking at them on NextDNS web UI. I had a lot of fun messing with my local AdGuardHome logs with visualizations, analysis, and alerting.

I was unclear, sorry about that. I used to have a PiHole, but have since switched to NextDNS

Bought a new smart TV a few months ago.

The move for me was never, not even at setup, connecting my new TV to wifi and simply routing everything through the Apple TV.

Seems to be working great so far at avoiding a lot of common “smart TV” problems.

Do you inspect all traffic going through ? I'll NEVER trust my TV to be "connected", I basically use all my "TV" as monitors for a raspi or chromecast.

I've been hunting and buying old (~2008-2012) Panasonic plasma TV's off my local craigslist alternative. They were the best in business as far as plasma screens go and the build quality is insane. Colour reproduction is very natural and deep blacks are just wow, only the OLEDs beat it but I'm not sold on the longevity of OLED screens yet. For example I bought Panasonic TH-42PZ85EA for $30, plugged in an STB for IPTV in one port, Chromecast in another and that's all the smart features I need, there's still a 3rd HDMI port in case you'd want to plug in a game console.

Isn't plasma screen susceptible to burn-out?

What search terms do you use?

It is but much of that is overblown because of really old plasma screens - early 2000s and such. Some manufacturers dealt with it better than others. If you're buying an old plasma without burn-in after ~10 years of use with minimal attention you'll be OK. I make sure not to leave paused frame for longer than 30m periods and enable screensavers where possible. You sometimes can see contours of an image after turning off the TV if the image was still for some time but they fade away quickly and not cause any artefacts. Chromecast has a screensaver, my STB as well. Things like channel logos are not a problem even after long viewing sessions. I've had Panasonic and LG plasmas. They do draw much more power (150-300W) and in case of active cooling you can hear the fans just slightly but otherwise, to me, it's a steal at these prices for this image quality.

EDIT: I search for "panasonic plasma" and make sure it's at least 1920x1080 screen and try to buy it under $50, so far I've bought a few for family and one for the holiday cabin.

Thanks for the tips! I see someone selling '11gen 200Hz' plasma, where does that stand?

I personally can vouch for old Panasonics, anything else is probably not worth the hassle. Just make sure it's FHD screen, has HDMI ports and it's a Panasonic - you can't go wrong. 11gen probably refers to G11, which you want to target at the oldest, the TV I've wrote about is a G11 panel.

www.avforums.com/threads/g11-panasonic-plasma-release.754974/

Plasma & burn-in: I have a '13 Panasonic Viera VT60 with 10,000 hours, no real burn in. I've got a '08 Viera and it's fine, too. I actually bought it with a vertical line malfunctioning, and it's seemingly sorted itself out (looks fine now). No dead pixels, no burn in, tens of thousands hours.

If I watch 24 hours of CS:GO, the white scoreboard text will be visible, but if I turn to max brightness/contrast and play Mad Max for 24 hours, it's always come back to normal.

The panels do get hot, though. That part's always been real.

Hey, would you mind telling how's owning VT60 in 2021? Would you buy one as a real OLED alternative? I see it has some smart features like "apps" and that is kinda a red flag to me, sooooo... "how is it?" Thanks!

agreed! the pioneer kuro line was considered the high-end during this era. owned one myself. skin tones were blotchy compared to the Sony Trinitron I also had at the time but otherwise pretty good, far superior to LCD.

List of Ad-Free TV sets by RTings.com https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/ads-in-smart-tv

> like breaking up the traditional channel bundle and increasing access to more personalized and niche content.

Yea this is benefit decreases every day. The "cord-cutting" phenomenon is dead. Want to watch a discovery show? Oh great, it's only on Discovery plus now, $5 a month. Want to watch Premier League soccer? Peacock Premium! Cobra Kai? Netflix... marvel? Disney+. Oh but you can't watch THIS nfl game on here because it's blacked out locally for TV. Champions League soccer? Sign up for CBS All Access. Can't forget HBO Max!

When you add everything up, cable for me was actually cheaper. But now I'm screwed, because they aren't putting shows on TV channels anymore to get people to sub to their streaming service.

If a service has something I want to watch, i sign up for it and immediately cancel it. My state has a law that any subscription that allows signups online has to allow cancellations online, so this is convenient.

Doesn't work well for sports, admittedly.

Has nobody rooted the firmware for "smart" TV's?

This comes up every time an article like this is posted on HN and the answer is basically no.

Instead of rooting, I wonder if it would be possible to simply replace the insides with a raspberry pi or similar thing

You can "lobotomise" one with something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363 which truly dumbs it down.

(The referred article seems to have disappeared, but the archive saves: http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... )

These folks have:

https://www.samygo.tv/

I'm tracking the need gap for dumb TVs on my problem validation platform[1], I'm adding links to high quality dumb TVs there as and when I find them. Please do let me know if you come across good dumb TVs which should be added there.

[1] 'Make TV dumb again': https://needgap.com/problems/64-make-tv-dumb-again-privacy-c...

Did “Dumb” TVs really need defending? Seems like if anything we should be convinced instead why Smart TVs are a good idea.

Maybe not in the HN bubble, but certainly outside. Many people don't give a fuck if it's smart or dumb, they buy what the salesman in the store manage to sell them. "Smart" sounds... Smart, so easy sell.

Then this article is simply preaching to a choir here. Perhaps it should be posted somewhere where more common people frequent so that their minds may be blown a bit, if they actually manage to read the article that is.

If they were not user hostile it could be nice. For example if the device itself ran the streaming software, you could turn on your TV from that streaming service’s phone app.

> For example if the device itself ran the streaming software, you could turn on your TV from that streaming service’s phone app.

That was what HDMI CEC was supposed to deliver... assuming that it works. Hit and miss.

But when it works... man, is it great!

Many TV already allow this, either via Chromecast or AirPlay. Personally I hate using my phone as a remote, but many TV supports it. Given that this doesn’t work without networking, the inclusion of these features, might be a trick to get people to allow teir TVs to get on a network.

For me one of the major down fall of smart TVs is that even with out the privacy invasion they all just SUCK. The interfaces are terrible, the hardware isn’t nearly fast enough, they just all feel slughish, you can’t expect software updates for more than a few years and you can’t be sure that you prefered streaming service is available if you not in a major market.

It’s actually a surprise that not one TV manufacturer has admitted that they aren’t in fact able to produce a quality smart TV.

Maybe it’s just me, but I use the AppleTV as the benchmark for what you need to deliver as a minimum. Anything less is a bad experience. Remember the AppleTV is still just a minor product for Apple, and companies who try to sell a similar, more integrated product, can’t do better? Why?

My roommate recently bought a TV that described itself as quad core. I love computers and I love software, but as a developer, I don't want computers in places they aren't necessary. Your TV is one of those to me.

Shopping for a new dryer and I had a similar thought. Nothing good is going to come of my dryer being connected to Wifi.

Haven't had an actual TV in years, I have a large HDMI monitor attached to a PS4 (aka. netflix machine)

RCA makes a truly-100%-dumb 4k@60hz 43" screen that's actually quite good -- model RTU4300.

Regarding Sceptre: if you buy one to use as a monitor turn down the "sharpness" to zero or it will look hideously awful. Same with the RCA RTU4300.

Unfortunately the sharpness menu is missing from all of their 43" and above displays. On those panels you need to go into the hidden "service menu" to adjust the sharpness. The procedure is different for each model, but you can generally find the secret code by googling around:

https://www.avsforum.com/search/1117513/?q=sceptre+service+m...

You'll be amazed how much better text looks.

I upgraded my TV to a Sony X950 because I cannot find a decent dumb TV, got really annoyed with the super buggy Google Android TV thing.

The cold start time is absurdly high, the basic feature of a TV - built in OTA TV player has a bug that the channel display stays on forever, the Airplay frequently play video with no sound. The only fix is find the 3 level deep restart menu item, because power on / off doesn’t matter. I would be more than happy to pay more for a normal Sony TV, with a “not using Google Android TV” label.

I also bought one recently. The most annoying issue for me is that it automatically changes the setting for my audio output and there is no way to tell it to just respect my damn setting and stop doing auto changes.

They're not all bad, at least. I bought a Sony X900H (2020) and I don't have those issues. Heck, it's fast enough that I put my Shield TV away.

Also -- you can restart by holding the power button on the remote, then choosing "Restart".

Ahh long press power button works! At least this would make my regular reboot for watching local channels easier.

You can tear my dumb 50" Panasonic plasma TV from my cold, dead fingers (or when it finally breaks, whichever comes first!)

Also, see my dumb Panasonic projector, again an awesome bit of kit.

We’ve a LG C9 OLED TV purchased in late 2019. It was never plugged into the internet. Wi-Fi is disabled on it as well. We’ve an Apple TV for everything else. We trust that far more than any smart TV. I would have paid extra for a TV that had no smarts: no Wi-Fi hadware, no fancy OS; if it was just really good at taking signal and presenting it to the screen well and was very very dumb otherwise I’d have chosen that.

Im in the market for a dumb TV. My current "smart" TV from Samsung is a joke. Slow to start, adverts in the UI. Snapped the "smart" remote so no voice stealling nonsense.

Im think a dumb panel connected to either a PC or RPi.

I don't see the point in swapping one tech company for another, so Apple and android are out. Dont trust them any mire that Samsung.

I wrote this guide on blocking the UI ads a few years ago. These days a PiHole might be more straightforward.

https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...

Question: Does a smart teevee need to be hooked up to the internet? I have a dumb teevee so I genuinely don't know. If not, can't one simply not ever give it access to a WiFi network, plug in a Chromecast/Firestick/Xbox, and call it good?

There’s no way of knowing it won’t decide to connect to an unsecured network without asking, and some have done just that.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a working open wireless network (ie. no captive portal) in public, let alone been able to access one from my living room. Are they more common in other countries?

Yes, but it is still running an OS (rather than, for instance, an RTOS) there’s more that can go wrong, and bugs may require updates, which require network access.

That said, I’ve got many friends who do exactly as you have said and never connect it. IIRC, there is some talk about including 5G modems in near term models to further encourage connection. The data is valuable enough to merit the inclusion.

It's possible. I've had Samsung and LG TVs that I've left disconnected most of the time and used them with external boxes like the Nvidia Shield, Apple TV, PCs and game consoles.

I've used wired connections or temporary Wifi network in order to prevent the TV from connecting to the internet without my knowledge.

I was able to update the firmware on my LG TV by downloading it and loading it onto a USB drive. Some firmware updates may improve picture quality or compatibility with external devices.

One annoyance is that there may be buttons on the remote that launch built in internet connected apps. It's important to have a TV that can easily switch between inputs.

FWIW, I recently bought a 50" Acer monitor [0] I use for all my viewing needs. There is a Google Chromecast and a Mac Mini hooked up to it; previously I also had an Amazon Fire stick (not needed any more since Google allowed casting from Amazon apps) and a Raspberry Py (I was never really able to find a good use for it, so I removed it). I don't watch live TV, so I don't need a tuner.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-EB490QKbmiiipx-Monitor-Black-P...

Or you can just treat your smart TV like a dumb TV. If you ignore the smart part, they generally work just fine as a monitor and speakers and HDMI input switch with ARC and CEC. Choose your TV for the picture quality and whatever other features you want. The cost penalty for buying smarts you don't use is usually very small. You don't need to connect your TV to the Internet. If you need to install a firmware update, connect it to the network then disconnect it, but you may never even need a firmware update if you aren't using the smartness.

I definitely second the Sceptre recommendation. Yeah, there are probably higher-quality displays out there, but my TV's been more than good enough for me, and the price point is pretty hard to beat. In terms of bang for the buck, a Sceptre TV and a box/stick of one's choosing is about as close to ideal as I've seen these days.

Hopefully they realize that the lack of smarts in their TVs is indeed a differentiator in a market flooded with "smart" TVs, and that they maintain that differentiator and resist the urge to copy everyone else.

If you're in the market for speakers, trying to find ones without "bluetooth" or "Alexa" support is just as difficult. I ended up buying speakers built for computers because they were simple and dumb and just played sound.

well, there's plenty of passive speakers which you can hook up to any amplifier from the last 50 years.

I don't quite follow the problems with having bluetooth support. Could you please elaborate?

Not OC, but I guess that if you're using Bluetooth, you depend on whatever DAC they've put onto the speaker, which may or may not be good enough for your taste.

I have the 65" 4k model and I couldn't be happier. I bought it for 350 dollars from Wal-Mart's website. I even use it as my all-day monitor for work.

This is exactly why I never connect TVs to the internet.

Then they are just dumb HDMI panels.

Soon they'll be coming with their own 5G chips that phone home over cell networks - no wifi access required.

Or, like the Amazon Echoes, they'll form a mesh network with your neighbors TVs and other devices and then just use your neighbor's wifi to phone home.

It's coming. I'm buying Spectres and I suggest others do the same.

Also why I keep a hackRF/BladeRF around.

I don't have any active cell phone modems on my property ever, so such transmissions would be easy to identify.

I just don't have a TV.

Modern problems require modern solutions.

Lol, if this all gets too onerous, I will just stick with my plasmas and CRT displays.

I have a few of each, they are in great condition and will be collecting a few more.

OLED may prove compelling enough to get me interested, but nothing LCD will, except as computer display.

I got super lucky on the plasma. It is big, beautiful and not all that smart. Got two of them, one seeing very light use.

Those things said, chances are the display tech that performs on par with fast plasma and CRT will probably come with the worst of this "smart" code.

Fine. I am game. Lets play. I will probably win, but it will also probably be a pain in the ass too.

Maybe I will just get a third plasma...

The other thing which has happened as a result of all this is I personally do not bother with TV much. Just hate the ads. Too much, too frequent, too repetitive.

I have never been happier. All that bonus time!

> Soon they'll be coming with their own 5G chips that phone home over cell networks - no wifi access required

This is something I never understood about the IOT bullcrap, even if something can connect to a mobile network, they'd still need the expense of a data subscription which render the whole thing pretty moot. It's not as if 5G providers were operating their network for free.

The device manufacturer will eat the cost of the 5G subscription, since it will likely be lower than the revenue generated from the harvested personal data.

How low can you get these ? Even at $5/month, that's $60... is a single user's data worth that much ?

It will be only tracking and surveillance data that the TV uploads to the mothership. It's not like they will let you stream YouTube, Netflix or Prime on their inbuilt 5G connection.

So the cost will be minimal and further reduced by the bulk volume that the manufacturer would purchase from the telco. Like how Amazon Kindle comes with a free 3G connection to download your books and upload your reading habits.

You're not answering the question, I'm not asking anything about streaming anything over 5G. I'm asking about the cost of IoT subscription, plus all the logistic to put in place in every country where a company intend to your product.

They did answer the question:

> So the cost will be minimal and further reduced by the bulk volume that the manufacturer would purchase from the telco. Like how Amazon Kindle comes with a free 3G connection to download your books and upload your reading habits.

I have no doubt a TV manufacturer selling millions of devices could get any US LTE carrier to sell them a low-bandwidth data service for pennies per device per month. You're talking about retail rates, when a bulk IoT buyer like this will not be paying anything close to retail.

As for the logistics, it's not that hard. They already have to produce separate SKUs for various regions for the power adapters. So you just add another variable: included SIM card. US gets a [Verizon|ATT|T-Mo] SIM, EU gets one of their carriers, etc.

When we had satellite TV (more than a decade ago), one of the conditions was to keep the receiver plugged into the phone line. If it wasn't plugged in, there'd be a $5 surcharge on the bill that month.

I figured this was because they were collecting data on viewership habits. Each customer profile must have been worth $5 or more, based on the surcharge amount.

(The phone line was useful for other things too, like ordering PPV/on-demand/premium channels through the menus directly, as opposed to calling them in through a 1-800 number.)

I'd expect that a company the size of Samsung is able to negotiate data plans at least an order of magnitude cheaper than anything available to the average consumer.

I’ve got an FCC radio license that says I get to hack my hardware and tell other people how to do the same.

And I enclose the display in a Faraday cage.

I bought a Sony smart TV about a year ago. I don't get ads per say, but there is a prominent area in the main menu where Sony wants to shill their services and that can't be turned off. Also, TV has to be restarted every week or two (it's android).

On the other hand, I love that I can easily cast screen from my laptop or photos from phone using built in chromecast.

Smart TVs are a mixed bag.

I have a Sony too, and it’s a little too chatty for my liking. I blocked port 53 unless it came from my own dns and added the below to my blocklist on a pihole. It’s deeply imperfect but has blocked a lot of their crap. I had to whitelist one Netflix domain.

https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...

Edit: I just checked. The Sony TV made 8249 requests in the last 24 hours. I have more locking down to do.

per se https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/per-se

Will we eventually arrive at a product spectrum, where customers can have the desired level of network integration for cel phone, camera, car, television, software, etc?

We use the same word for governance as we do for data: the state.

Having a hardcopy DVD, a dump player, and a dumb TV allows you to partake of the state you own without the State (or its BigTech owners) hassling you.

Much to be said for that.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that in the era before smart TVs, the revenue model for most TV networks was advertising.

Now I pay money to netflix so as to not see those, my tv should have nothing to do with it; except that corrupt execs and wall street zombies want more more more, so they put ads on everything, forcing me to watch their drivel, all supported by software developers and electrical engineers who have money signs for pupils.

Saw this just after reading this post. Not a bad development.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-best-feature-of-...

Uh-huh. Until Google decides to alter the bargain in accordance with paragraph 3.5.34.3.67.2 of the User Agreement.

More than likely.

Pray that I don’t alter it further.

I have been using a living room PC on my TV for many years. I found it worth the extra expense and added workflow... but I don't watch cable or sat TV, so I don't know how to integrate them into my setup.

I don't use a TV anymore, as I use my pc to watch movies and series. But for my mother, on the futures I'm thinking buying a cheap big computer screen and plug a chrome cast or something similar.

I think a better term would be “simple TV”. It has one job and does it well.

In India, amazon calls it a Standard TV.

Im praying my pre-android Sony 55" will live another 5 years. Wifi is disabled and i will never run sw update. Works with AppleTV now, sound via AV receiver.

What is actually the appeal of a (smart) TV - especially for the tech-friendly scene on HN? Why doesn't a large monitor cut it? (Serious question)

My LG CX "just works". Turns on in seconds, all the apps work fine, and everything is integrated really well. Certainly beats having to juggle three or four other things to get all the same services and figure out how to get the HDR/Dolby Vision and 4K-ness working between them all.. I'd probably need an HDMI switch as well. Instead I have one device with update-able apps and it works flawlessly. The only thing I needed to add was a Bluray player.

Oh, and the sound is fantastic, complete with Dolby Atmos support, without needing a soundbar or anything separate at all. Plus where am I going to find a non-smart 65" OLED panel with Dolby Vision support anyway?

fair enough. I guess I don't have such high expectations regarding the multimedial experience. it seems a 30 to 40 inch display would be more than large enough for my home cinema activities (at the moment I'm actually using a 26 inch monitor). and soundwise I'm anyway wearing bluetooth ANC headphones. all connected my notebook.

Yeah, I'm really into watching movies at home (though not quite enough to have a lot of separate expensive gear) so there are a few tick boxes that it's nice to have wrapped up in one purchase :-)

If I wasn't really into movies though, then yes, I would just want the simplest thing.. HDR, OLED, etc. are all an expensive waste if you're not watching content aimed for them.

I am biiiig movie watcher, as well! I guess it's a lot about what you get used to. Never had a big TV - maybe that's why I'm happy with my modest setup.

> Incredibly, Samsung even recommends (https://www.samsung.com/us/support/tip/TIP00083197/) that you run virus and malware checking on your TV regularly.

The linked page does not contain the word "virus" or "malware"

looks like that page did indeed mention both terms: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303012835/https://www.samsu...

now it's a redirect to https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00077524/

But does anybody here really use dumb TV? How is a dumb TV + a TV stick different from a smart TV?

I think the idea is that you don't use a stick but instead some kind of open source content manager like kodi.

Of course I do. I bought it for $150 on Black Friday in 2016, not realizing that I would never have a chance to buy one again. I refuse to upgrade. I don't use a stick or anything either, I just plug in my laptop with HDMI.

So that's just a monitor.

Less buggy in my experience. My Sony’s software is pretty buggy, and the experience is overall poorer than my previous setup of dumb + chromecast. Plugging a chromecast is doable of course but it feels silly since I can cast directly to the TV. Google now sells a stick with a full blown android tv implementation and I’m sure it’s much better than what manufacturers are putting on their TVs.

Also, software ages much more poorly than screens. TV have a useable life of more than 10 years. So the smart features will be broken long before the TV. On a dumb tv you can upgrade the stick for 50$. Not so long ago I was using an ancient plasma TV just fine with a chromecast.

To me the real deal is still dumb tv + Linux media pc. If freedom and privacy is important to you then you have full control over that.

If you use an apple tv, then all you want of your tv is to be a dumb hdmi display

Just don’t connect them to Wi-Fi.

I really hope they don’t start trying to auto connect to the xfinity ssid...

I recently bought a new "LG UN7300 UHD 43" Smart 4K TV with AI ThinQ". I will never connect it to WiFi as it is plugged into my media PC. I'm hoping this will have some benefit to the resale value when mainstream realise the benefits of Smart TV's that have not been 'tainted' by firmware updates.

I don't really see any criticisms inherent to the idea of a smart TV, although some might like them to be simpler for simplicity's sake. But I would imagine most people would love their smart TVs if they were not just one more convoluted layer of ads to generate continuous revenue and spy on you to harvest data.

I just wish you could buy TVs with either Apple TV or Chromecast built in like we have for Android Auto or CarPlay.

(some, usually lower end, TVs do have chromecasts but they’re not super common)

I’d never voluntarily buy one. Tech ages much more quickly than TV panels and I don’t want to have to replace my entire TV unit just to upgrade the computing part. Also, you just know that the quality of the computing bits would be tied to the quality of the screen: you wouldn’t be able to get a high-end Apple TV paired with a reasonably priced screen.

I think the current combination of dumb or defanged screen plus an easily replaceable settop box is just about perfect. I’d vastly rather mix and match components than be saddled with some awful chimera.

I agree with you completely but since it seems like we’re already in a future where basically every TV is smart this seems like the least bad option. At least Apple TVs ans Chromecasts get updates for a decent amount of time.

It's inherent inasmuch as that if companies are able to profit by using 'smartness', they will do it, absolutely. I've yet to see one company large enough to sell TVs with a proven track record of not selling data for ads if able.

Instead of a TV you can buy a 4K monitor and some audio speakers. Simple but effective.

TVs come in bigger sizes.

Yeah, I used to buy TVs and use them as bigger, cheaper monitors. Now it seems like I need to do the opposite... too bad it probably costs a hefty chunk of change to get a giant monitor!

Cool. Can you hook me up with a hyperlink to a 75-inch computer monitor?

Maybe we should be reading more books? TV is a classic waste of time anyways and now the experience is becoming more and more user hostile.

I’m honestly worried about this tech coming after computers next. Windows tried this before but I’m thinking it was a test run.

Like watch an un-skippable ad before sending an email levels of bullshit.

What about using a mini-pc with a TV tuner to bypass your TV software???

If only my Samsung tv would stop killing the hdmi ports of Apple TV’s :(

In my parent's house, they have a regular flatscreen and they bought a Chromecast. There are ads when they use YouTube but thankfully Netflix does not.

If you pay for YouTube Premium, like you do Netflix, you can go totally ad-free.

I don't think they are concerned too much with ads as much as I am.

just bought an insignia with fire TV today. Took me 20 minutes to figure out how to tune to a local TV station.

fine, you'll have dumb tvs (but smart phones and homes), but your kids won't.

Nope, my home is dumb too. I turn my lights on with physical switches.

I don't buy anything with "Smart" in its name.

Don't SmartTV manufacturers risk getting fried with GDPR? If I didn't consent to the TV phoning home my habits, then it is legally not allowed to do so.

Remember when Google got fined 50 megaeuros? They sent location data despite user opt-out. I guess Samsung wants to be more popular than Google.

Cool domain name.

this is intresting

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