It's all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.
[Citation Needed]
False. You would need to buy (or just randomly happen to have) a smart TV model that exhibits this characteristic, which would be very difficult to find, as there is a very wide spread of smart TV models and features, and obviously this "feature" wouldn't be advertised. This is neither easy nor free.
You're also clearly moving the goalposts. You first asked for evidence, and then discarded the evidence because "it wasn't good enough".
Nor is this capability either technically difficult to implement, illegal, easily-noticed by the average consumer, or abnormal for companies like Samsung, which already engage in highly-intrusive ad-surveillance activities[1].
If this is a common thing, this should be easy to replicate. If it is one unverified reported incident in the whole world then... I have to be skeptical.
Don't get me wrong though, my innate cynicism expects this or similar via 5G to be coming in the near future. But it doesn't appear to be happening yet.
If the reddit poster had provided model numbers, not just "Samsung TVs" this would become trivial to verify. They however did not. They also didn't provide any proof other than "it deffo happened guys".
> You're also clearly moving the goalposts. You first asked for evidence, and then discarded the evidence because "it wasn't good enough".
Again, as I stated in my reply while I understand your skepticism and distrust of the industry my standard of evidence is somewhat above one random guy on reddit with no verifiable evidence.
Your best bet for a "non smart TV" is either a commercial/industrial one, or just use a monitor instead.
Next year they will switch off DVB to migrate to DVB-T2, and of course I must buy her a new TV (using a decoder it's not an option, too complex having to manage two remotes controls), and it seems that nobody produces dumb TVs anymore...
Takes me a minute to turn on my stupid smart TV and switch it to HDMI in
They are not the high end models either, I have a $630 one from 2016 and a $600 one from 2020.
Meanwhile, my dumb LCD TV from ~2008 only does cold boots and comes up in maybe 2 seconds, no matter what.
Unfortunately, I do not see how some of these smaller players can come close to being competitive with the big players seeing how small the profit margins are on physical devices.
Unless they have a reputation for very high quality, I assume there are lots of compromises being made on the hardware side to be able to compete on price.
I doubt the executives at Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Hisense, etc are sitting there and consciously choosing to keep people away from fast, dumb TVs for the hell of it. It is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins, no one is obviously making much money, so after all these years, I would surmise they are making decisions that allow them to stay in business after all these years.
Personally, I am biased towards Sony, and I am happy with the speed of the two consumer line TVs I have purchased. However, I only use them in conjunction with Apple TV, so I have no idea with changing channels or inputs or any of that is like.
Again, at least part of why this is happening is they can't sell ads and spyware-data with dumb TVs. Features that consumers want may be a factor, but I can guarantee you (as in: I've had some actual insight into the industry) that a big reason is that they can monetize their customers' data and eyeballs with smart TVs, and so undercut any competitors who choose not to do that. Price matters a lot to TV buyers, so this is effective at driving sales (and so, keeping your product on store shelves, and avoiding a product death-spiral).
Apparently not? That's my point, that these large TV manufacturers must have enough insight to know if something simple like that would be economical.
I dunno—this TCL Roku TV's the best-performing smart TV I've used, including some very expensive ones. It's really fast except for cold boots (again: these only happen if the power's actually been interrupted, or, rarely, on updates). Roku's OS helps, since it's way less resource-hungry than, say, Android-derived operating systems. I've done some work with Roku devices so I've used lots of them, and even the very low-end ones have always performed really well. The OS is weird, but you can't say it's not (relatively) resource efficient and responsive.
... I do have a much-worse brand of Roku TV that is badly under-powered. It sucks. It's the brand that replaced TCL at our local Costco—Hisense, it's called. Looks almost the same, costs almost the same, but is terrible. Fine if you treat it as a dumb panel and just use stuff plugged in to it, but terrible if you intend to use the built-in Roku OS for anything other than switching inputs. Frequent (apparent) out-of-memory crashes, many less-well-made (but major) streaming "apps" are laggy, and so on.
Faraday cage or soldering iron, anyone?
I would love to dive into such an example.
At this point, I just assume everything is spying.
(Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to harvest your data, I guess.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/18/you-wat...
I guess keeping it totally off would be better, but then it kinda defeats the point of getting a smart tv
edit: It's a Roku, so probably worse than others.
Trying to find a dumb TV is like trying to find a car without a built in radio. You're welcome to leave it switched off.
Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Some may be slow. Some may have a poor interface. I'd worry about solving for that rather than expecting manufacturers to cater to a very niche group.
Unless they find an open WiFi network.
Hardcoding DNS for example which makes Pi-hole ineffective. That is increasingly happening and should quite rightly be criticised.
It's absolutely necessary to try to anticipate the future, because the future always becomes the present. If we don't try to anticipate, we will be stuck with whatever is given to us. Like the introduction of ads on Android TV.
Are you aware of any TVs that are doing that?
Found it: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...
Ugh. Looks like the contents of the post got deleted.
But here's another example of devices getting sold with their own cellular connectivity preinstalled.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/01/huawei-reportedly-plans-f...
Fortunately, some thoughtful person saved it in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20201003141448/https://old.reddi...
Contents:
So I just had a rather annoying experience. I own two Samsung Smart TVs, which honestly gave me the heebie jeebies to purchase. With that said, at the end of the day I decided that as long as I didn't hook it up to the net, I'd be good to go. I've been using them for a few years, and have felt pretty comfortable with the situation, so imagine my surprise when I sit down to watch something on the living room tv (which I don't use all that often) and my show is interrupted by a notification that "SmartHub" had updated.
After digging around in settings for a moment, I realized that one of my next door neighbors had installed an open router with internet, and my tv had silently automatically connected to it and began doing its normal internet stuff. I have no idea how long it was connected like that.
After looking though the settings and a few Google searches later, I realized there was no actual way to disabled the wireless connection on that TV. It expected an internet connection, and intended to get one. Ultimately, I managed to get it to stop what it was doing by letting it connect to my router and then blocking it via access control. I then followed up by going into "IP Settings" and setting that to manual, while leaving all the values at 0. It complained, but allowed me to keep the setting.
Anyhow, figured I'd share, since I imagine quite a few people here are also not keen on a smart tv connecting to the net, given some of the history surrounding them.
Now, if we're talking about the danger of devices incorporating their own wireless communications and phoning home on a network of their manufacturer's own choosing without the knowledge or consent of the owner, that is a serious risk, and one that IMHO should be mitigated by regulating it out of existence before it has any chance to become established practice.
It is sad that wanting a simple, modular display that we can upgrade peripherals around is niche these days. In a way, car makers took a step in the right direction with more radios adopting CarPlay & Android Auto, acknowledging that their own radios can't outsmart an evolving mobile ecosystem.
I can't clock it, but our current TV seems to take longer to, well, turn on, than the tube tellys of yore.
This is also why it's really, really hard to build a Roku competitor starting from 0, without a lot of starting capital. You won't be able to match them on price, and also won't yet have the scale to subsidize your own devices with ad sales, so you'll need to sell at a loss (remember: you also need to get onto shelves in stores to compete, and they'll have harsh price requirements, calibrated by what your ad- and spyware-subsidized competitors are selling for, if you want shelf-space with an unknown brand) for quite a while.
No, they're not. They're collaborating to eliminate choice. The vast majority of the market being taken by smart TVs is a theoretical result of the market. The fact that no manufacturers slip in to clean up the 5% of the market who are willing to pay a slight premium not to have a smart TV is evidence of tacit collusion.
I think you may be over-estimating how typical you are.
What people are is utterly powerless, and living in a kleptocracy that allows markets to be funneled in particular directions by eliminating all alternative choices.
The expensive LG TV I bought ~5 years ago was snappy and fast when I got it, but today it's extremely slow and unresponsive. That's my fault for being a bad consumer and not buying the latest model every year.
On a serious note, I wonder if there's a jailbreak scene for smart TVs? It'd be awesome to be able to replace their spyware garbage with a basic OS that only lets me change inputs, or maybe something like Kodi if I'm feeling fancy.
I wonder if part 2 ever came out.
E: Ah ha!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25934286
Unfortunately, the TV proved to be quite secure it seems.
Until manufacturers start selling TV's that don't work at all if they're not connected.
Or, as is the case with my Samsung TV, they could just be arbitrarily annoying until you do connect - pepper the user with requests to connect and put up modals everywhere until they finally relent.
Funny you should say that. My car defaults back to radio on when you start it.
Mine does this, and also when I disconnect CarPlay, it immediately turns on the radio at full blast.
My "smart" TV does the same thing: whereas on older dumb TVs, when I told it to sleep, it worked 100% of the time, on my newer TV, it works 30% of the time.
Sometimes it decides to switch to Tuner input (even after I've disconnected the antennae! Argh!). Sometimes it just leaves the whole display on, with no input.
Finally, one time in 20, when I try to turn on my TV, it just gets into a reboot loop.
Everything about having Android TV is objectively worse for my use cases than my old dumb TV, which just displayed the most recent input and turned off when I told it to.
Me too. Subaru?
Really, I find modern smart TV too lagging, it's like you press a button on the remote and the TV responds even 1 seconds after, it gives you the impression that the remote is not working properly, but it's not there the problem.
A TV has to do one thing, and do it well, let me watch some TV programs, from external sources or from the aerial, with a good image and sound quality (but the last one it's impossible to find on any TV these day and you need always an external sound system). I don't need Netflix or other video streaming services, if I need that I just plug a media center PC in the HDMI port, why complicating the TV with stuff that still doesn't work well and it's slow as hell?
Speaking about car radios... car radios these days are horrible. They present you DAB radio as the primary choice, that has an terrible sound quality. FM reception is still bad. The quality of the speakers either as bad. And I'm taking about the car radio of a Mercedes car that costs 40k euros. The stock car radio of my 2010 Volkswagen Golf is far better, better sound quality, better radio reception, better responsiveness of the radio (physical knobs and buttons that I can operate without looking at them VS unresponsive touch screen interfaces that are dangerous to use when you drive).
And the worse thing? You cannot update the radio in every modern car. They destroyed the market of aftermarket car stereos, how can you replace the radio if it's not only a radio but it's the interface that you use to control all the car functions?
I just have mine hooked up to my pc with a long hdmi cable so my use case might be unusual, though.
There’s the LCD screen
A driver to convert an input (hdmi, vga, ntsc, DVB/ATSC, MPEG, HLS)
A speaker (or more), with input (from driver or not)
A control plane of some sort to control the other bits (brightness, gamma, input, volume)
It seems that people who want dumb TVs want most of that, including different inputs, but just a specific driver and/or control plane
A computer monitor will do most of this just fine, especially if matched with a separate speaker.
By the presence of a built-in TV receiver (DVB, ISDB, etc). If it doesn't have such a built-in receiver, it's a monitor.
See the same difference in the audio world: there is monitor/studio equipment that has the purpose of reproducing the sound as closely as possible to the original media, and then there is listening equipment that is meant to make the sound more enjoyable for the listener.
Monitors also doesn't include a TV receiver. While that can be an advantage in countries like mine for people that wants only to look at internet content since if you have a TV with a receiver you have to pay a tax, it doesn't work for people that just want's to watch TV, meaning connecting the power and aerial cable to the TV and use it. You need an external decoder, that needs to have a separate remote control, you then need two power outlets, more cables, you then have to install the decoder somewhere, it's not as clean as having it integrate in the TV itself.
I think especially at my grandma, that doesn't have internet, and wants a TV that is as simple as possible, press 1 on the remote and the TV turns on at the channel 1. Press volume up/down and the power button. Nowadays it's difficult to find TV with that requisite, modern remotes have a ton of buttons what will bring up functionalities that then are difficult to exit, especially for an 85 years old woman that never used a computer or a smartphone or anything other than a TV and the landline phone.
I use a monitor as a TV but it doesn't have optical out just a horrid horrid headphone jack so I had to buy a HDMI switch and universal remote just to mimic what a TV does.
But if you pick a good (quick, without annoying UI, allows USB upgrade and offline configuration and so on) smart TV and just don’t connect it, I think that’s probably a better idea than getting a commercial monitor for example.
When Apple came out with their new Apple TV, I bought one, connected that to my TV, and disconnected my TV from the internet. Now life is good since the Apple TV is buttery smooth and does not have ads.
I mean I don’t actually use any of the “smart” stuff. No Apps or anything. Not sure why anyone would want to? I watch my TV channels on the built in receiver (90% or more of what I watch is regular scheduled TV, I love my old fashioned TV channels!), and I cast stuff to it when I want to stream Netflix or sports.
I don't subscribe to TV/cable/satellite. I only have Youtube Premium (ad free Youtube videos; not Youtube TV), Netflix, Amazon Prime TV, Nebula, and a local Plex server.
That way you don’t need to see any of the poor guis, ads etc.
Currently I just have my tv at stock settings with no network connection but it keeps annoyingly asking for a network connection.
What would be my dream is the apple TV + xbox utalising hdmi-cec to auto turn on and auto switch to the correct source then turn off when done so I didn't even need the tv remote
It's a hospital TV Check for more on their website.
My late 30s Frigidaire has no electronics at all...
Anyway, GP asked if there were fridges running Android, yes there are. Even if they are not being sold by Samsung in the present, it is a safe assumption that not all of these have died in the line of duty.
"Aren't there already fridges that run Android?"
Can be confidently answered in the affirmative.