It's cartel behavior. Producers just silently agree to not do stuff that would disadvantage them on the long term.
Everybody keeps going on about "yeah, but someone will undercut them, free market, bla bla", but it never happens in practice.
Outside of HN, people do want smart features, from what I can tell, and don't even consider that their TV is a privacy concern.
From the wal-mart website, it looks like the 55" Sceptre is dumb but the 65" is smart. When I bought my 65" tv earlier this year, I couldn't find a dumb tv that fit all of the specs I wanted so I compromised and got a vizio (simple, chromecast based smart tv) and just never connected it to wifi. It doesn't seem to nag me about the smart features or connecting it to the internet at all
I don’t know anyone who uses the smart features in their TV, except my wifes parents who use the Netflix app in their Sony TV. Everyone else just use an AppleTV, ChromeCast or a box from their cabel/internet provider.
Because the current generation of TV buyers are used to the concept of purchasing separate hardware to deliver content. That is changing now.
I had a similar realization about streaming v piracy. 15 years ago everybody my age was pirating music and TV. It led to a lot of viruses and malware for some, but everybody more or less knew where to go to for that stuff, even as P2P networks were being shut down left and right.
Today, young people don't really do that. Spotify, YT and Netflix apparently fixed enough UX and content gap issues that torrents and stuff aren't considered necessary anymore.
The same will happen with TVs.
I asked about this a while back on HN. I’ve heard enough people complain about smart TV’s even outside of the sort of tech privacy bubble that I wondered why no one tried to take a dumb-TV angle or how difficult it might be to do so.
Was basically told, that consumer hardware is mostly a commodity business and that margins are super thin so it’s not really a profitable idea. So the companies turn to smart TVs where they can make up the cost by things like advertising.
FWIW in a later discussion elsewhere, I was pointed to a handful of Dumb-TVs being sold at Walmart, etc. I don’t recall whether you have options for high resolution or large sizes though. Commercial displays also get brought up in this discussion, but if my experience with other commercial hardware is any indication, general consumers may have a hard time getting their hands in those.
Not everyone can afford to not care. You probably make a lot of money :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Double-49-Inch-Monitor-LC49RG...
49", curved, $1100.
An average Smart TV:
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-55-Inch-Crystal-TU-8000-Built...
65", straight, $550.
So, yes.
How old are your peers? My house in college was full of "DIY TVs" but once I got my own place I was tired of squinting at a 24" display
My TV is 65". That's not a monitor, and a monitor isn't a replacement for that size, and the closest monitor is the 40-something inch HP Omen which costs over four times what my TV cost.
So I'm not sure what you're talking about