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Comment by ladyanita22 | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, the software platforms are completely different. The smart displays market right now is a hot mess. Only Google's or Amazon's should be purchased.

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Or none of them. Buying anything marketed as “smart” seems like a bad idea these days.

I guess I'm far outside the loop as I don't know what a smart display is or why I would even want one. I did a search and read a little bit, but it just seems like a bunch of vague references to some kind of assistant.

I own one of these in my kitchen. The only thing I really find it useful for is as clock with the weather on it and as something to yell at to play music when I'm washing dishes. Both could be done with a simple smart speaker.

The thing I hate most about this device is that it displays beautiful landscape photos but I can't tap on an interesting photo if I want to know what the photo's subject is.

You might see this photo information in Google Home - of course if you have the app installed on your phone and you registered the device in it.

Same issue here.

From my googling it just seems like a display to show the weather, calendar, what music you’re playing, etc. [1]

[1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/smart-display/

I guess that so many things wear the "smart" moniker it's just muddied the waters to the point that it could be anything.

Assuming that you want to rent content via a streaming service you basically have to buy into one of these devices just to have something that supports DRM. You can use a PC but just the processor that supports L1 DRM is more expensive than one of these dongles.

you mean L1 right? L3 forces you to watch in 480p resolution unless you have L1 hardware and Linux is forced to L3 and in some services you can't even stream at all :( its crazy oh well pirated content have the full quality and play perfectly fine on Linux.

Yes, sorry, I always get the levels backwards.

Streaming services work fine on my ancient windows laptop. What's the problem?

Have a closer look at what quality you are getting. It's most likely 480p max, depending on the streaming platform and the licensing deals at play for your region.

“Smart” is just a euphemism for surveillance.

Does that also extend to your phone?

Yeah. I'd rather have something handheld with as much freedom as a standard computer than a smartphone. Unfortunately that doesn't exist in a fully usable form yet so I'm stuck with a smartphone for now. I plan on eventually ditching it though.

> Only Google's or Amazon's should be purchased.

Sounds like a monopolistic system reinforcing itself.

I would strike Google off that list, given that they have a history of cutting support for hardware that's only a few years old.

If google is trying to monopolize the hot mess by its power, then it's working, right?

If you buy a consumer anything from Google, you have only yourself to blame.

People buy it from Lenovo, Google is the gods they pray to so that their devices wouldn't be broken by the updates.

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