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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I gave my very nice SmartTV to a hiking buddy last year and bought a cheap dumb TV from Walmart for $190 that only has HDMI inputs. I bought the latest Apple iTV box, and I couldn’t be happier with this setup.

In addition to better privacy (don’t SmartTV manufacturers make 30% of the profit on a TV from your data?), the user experience is so much better, no comparison really.

My wife is not 100% happy with the screen quality so I might replace the TV with a studio monitor, but for my tastes what we have is close to perfect.

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> don’t SmartTV manufacturers make 30% of the profit on a TV from your data?

I'm not sure about all manufacturers but in the case of Vizio, selling user data:

- accounts for 65% of their net profit

- is double the amount of money they make from selling actual TVs

- grew 134% year over year as of Q3 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...

https://investors.vizio.com/news/news-details/2021/VIZIO-HOL...

>I bought the latest Apple iTV box

Okay but...

>In addition to better privacy

I'd very much like a source on that. I filter and block everything (via whitelist) from my TV and streaming boxes. Apple hardware and services are by far the ones that makes the most connections in both amount of connections and amount of sources connecting to. A Xiaomi android box is on a far second-place.

IMO "Apple privacy" is a myth with no proof ever published unless you think Apple for some reason is a better data collector end-point. I don't believe they are and it is also beside the point. Data collected is staying collected forever which makes the collector irrelevant. They can always change their opinion - you cannot. Amount of privacy related info collected is the only thing that matters and since I cannot see the excact data collected there's only amount collected left. In that Apple is definitely #1.

Fair point. I consider the Apple TV box to be more privacy preserving than SmartTVs.

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