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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

You're right to point out that these problems arise across entire industries. You can't vote with your money if all otherwise good TVs have crap built into them. And it's not easy for a new entrant to gain a foothold in such a high-tech market. And even if they do, there's plenty of temptation to go down the same route of milking customers who already bought your product.

Sooner or later, we won't even remember how it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years?

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> Sooner or later, we won't even remember how it was before. Who even remembers the internet before advertising morphed it into something completely different? How long was that period? 5 years?

That's what worries me. After a long stint of playing entirely only smartphone games, going back to play some older titles on PC was... really weird. None of the usual pay to play friction or engagement traps that are so ubiquitous.

I did not feel happy that the lack of these things that I actually hated was making me uneasy.

Is the memory hole effect really that strong?

Most kids don't even know what it's like to play a game that's not riddled with ads and designed around microtransactions.

There are a lot of things that require a generation (of people) to change. For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.

So when you see things like the investment that's going into things like game streaming and it seems stupid, you have to consider there may not be any expectation of capturing the current market. They're after the market that's in elementary school right now.

I don't know -- when I was a kid, in the arcade, the machines constantly prompted me to insert another quarter to continue playing.

Yeah, but we solved that problem, and now it's back.

The nice thing about those games is the cost could be offset by skill. FTP games now offset the cost using time, when you can offset it at all.

>the latency of game streaming services is awful

Latency is not a problem with game streaming. I'd say quality is more of a problem. With streaming you are only going to get the image a few frames late which is not bad at all.

Based on your comment, the already-bad state of latency across the software stack will get even worse. I really don't want that.

> For example, the latency of game streaming services is awful if you're used to a local experience, but if you ask a 12 year old that's never experienced low latency, local gaming, they don't even realize it could be different. They'll happily play high latency streamed games.

That's subjective and dependent on the service and the game. I have Stadia, GeForce Now, and local games ( with some overlap). Latency is minimal and barely visible ( invisible for grand strategy games).

The topic with the TVs is going to be a problem for me in a few years. My current TV is from 2013 - it may have some years to go, but at some point, it will fail.

I've had a short look at the market, and all the "good" brands (Samsung, LG, Sony) show horrific ads. It looks like the cheap brands simply sell your data. Then there are some local brands, which sell non-TV TV's (no tuner, there's a tax on that). They don't have any smarts at all, but the one I've seen had terrible picture quality

Just don't connect them to the internet, now you have a TV that's cheaper than it should be because they expect to show you ads, but they can't

This remains true for now, but expect the ubiquity of things like Amazon Sidewalk, Helium network, and embedded cellular modules in devices to make it hard to avoid a device that phones home.

My Sony would pop up a nag screen in the middle of a movie or show to remind me that it wasn't connected to the internet. Eventually, I caved and connected it.

Won’t be long before they have 5G chips in and that isn’t your choice anymore. Kindles have done that since 3G, cars have started doing that, Tesla trains AI on all owner driving data, VW new electric (ID3?) will be their first with a mandatory perma HQ connection, IIRC.

Kindle with 3G was great, free internet globally. Never once showed me an ad, and most Kindles didn't have it.

When that day comes buy a monitor, or hack the firmware.

You can always break off the aerial.

Cell phone connections don't need to use aerials anymore. The antennas in smartphones are often planar arrays or square-ish fractal antennas. From the outside they literally look like little boxes or squares. The casual mechanic might have a hard time distinguishing them from a chip.

> Won’t be long before they have 5G chips in and that isn’t your choice anymore. Kindles have done that since 3G

How do these things work? Do they have a contract with a phone service operator in each country in the world for unlimited data, or what?

The device company usually has a bulk data contract with a large telecom. It isn't unusual for IoT device companies to end up as minor telecom providers themselves, buying bandwidth in bulk and reselling it to consumers.

I don't think you can buy a kindle with a cellphone radio anymore, and the ones that had them cost extra.

This is an option until they require internet.

Also the other side is that these cheap TVs are slow as hell. My Vizio has a 15 second startup time before it responds to commands, while it's "Smart"Cast stuff does what it does. This is before it responds to other commands, ex volume. And this is at each session, not cold boot only.

Dell sells a 55” conference room monitor at a decent price. That - or something like it - will be my next “TV”

What you are looking for are generally sold as "large format displays". Basically tvs for commercial purposes that do not have any of that crap. Most projector manufacturers, even the consumer ones, have also been good about avoiding "smart" features.

They cost inordinately more than what profit they are getting from ads & spying, and are often missing things like multiple HDMI inputs. It's not a real solution, but a bad workaround.

And more of these displays are getting these kinds of smart features added, anyway. It's going to become increasingly difficult to get a dumb panel at all.

My TV is from 2012 and I'm not all that worried about it failing. Modern TVs don't draw much power, nothing inside them gets very hot, no moving parts, etc. I would be surprised if I don't get ten more years out of it.

Look into the cheap Sceptre displays. They make non-smart panels with decent resolution and performance, so long as you have external speakers and use the optical audio output instead of the output from their garbage DAC.

Best Buy still sells a dumb TV. Sadly the Insignia N10 only goes as far as 43" and 1080p. I bought a set of the 32" model for my brothers.

Annoyingly, it STILL takes a few seconds to start up.

My living room TV is a 39" Panasonic from 7 years ago. It's dumb as a brick.. but I almost never watch TV so this is fine!

It'd be nice if you could buy a brand new 55" OLED or whatever and not have to deal with smart TV software. I guess there's the gigabyte, LG, and alienware monitors.

You can vote with your wallet.

Don’t buy a TV, let that market die already.

What's the reason to buy a TV over a monitor? At least so far, monitors don't have anti-features.

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