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Comment by friseurtermin | Hacker News Reader

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

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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".

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?

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