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Comment by car_analogy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah like you can sell your smart TV and buy one of the approximately zero remaining consumer-available non-smart TVs.

Voting with your wallet didn't work so far, but stay the course! Any moment now it'll start working, I'm certain.

Not disagreeing with the sentiment here, but I was recently surprised to find my LG smart TV allowed me to reject their terms of service and privacy policy.

If you reject them, it cuts off access to all of the smart tv stuff (including the App Store, apps, etc). Seems like telemetry also stops.

I was pretty delighted to discover this.

I did the same with my Sony Bravia, although I still have access to apps I want to use. I don't even know what the features are that I rejected cause I don't care about them.

My Samsung tv puts itself in “demo mode” if you aren’t on the Wi-Fi and it’ll shut itself down and reset all its settings every hour.

> Samsung

I see your problem.

But why would you but anything but an LG OLED?

Mine bleeds pretty bad around the edge. Not bad enough I'd go through a replacement process but I won't buy one again.

That is just the nature of TVs, you aren’t going to get vastly better QC by going with a different brand.

I just buy from somewhere with easy returns.

My contractor dropped my previous tv which was like 10 years old and that’s what he got as a replacement. Went from 1080p to 4k.

Unfortunately, that was your mistake.

Never buy anything Samsung branded. No phones, no consumer SSDs, no TVs, no monitors, no laptops, no phones and tablets, no fridges and wash machines and driers. Nothing. The entire brand is toxic.

Hell, don't even do business with their fab, ask Nvidia about how that turned out for them.

Does it not periodically bug you if you do that? That's what happened with mine until I eventually relented and started getting bugged by their "notification" advertising instead

Approximately zero does not equal zero.

Affirmation: I got a Spectre non-smart piece-of-shit TV before they sold out at Walmart. It's such a piece of shit it only lets you play mp3s from a directory on flash drive.

Trust me, there's a piece of shit out there somewhere with your name on it. It's just a matter of whether you're going to put in the effort required to find it.

"It's the question that drives us, Neo." -The Matrix

why would i want my tv to play mp3s?

A lot of times when I'm entertaining and cooking, I'll put some music on. Usually around the holidays.

My TV gets a single HDMI in, from my receiver; no wifi. Everything else gets plugged into the receiver. Everything internet related gets played from an external devices, to the receiver, to the TV.

Cause shitty TVs are known the world over for their quality sound?

Flat panel sound has gotten shittier over time. The move toward thinner and thinner units means jankier speakers.

What I meant is: that is the extent of non-TV business that the TV will do. There's no connecting to wifi, hence no phoning home.

IDK, my TV went out 3 days before the Super Bowl and I bought a perfectly fine Sceptre (not Spectre) TV from Amazon and got it the morning of the game. As a dumb TV it does exactly what it's supposed to.

side note: I've previously stated that I refuse to buy from Amazon but in this case I had to bite the bullet and take them up on their free month of Prime so that I'd get it by the Super Bowl. They also had other brands with various levels of dumbness.

If you’re happy with 55” or less of 1080p, used LCD TVs are dirt cheap.

Like, I bought a 42” for the cabin for $40, and got a replacement remote for $8 off Aliexpress. I could sell the stand and power supply for about $100 because they’re shared with more “modern”/bigger units.

Everyone is buying the latest 4K smart junk. And losing the stand when they wall-mount it.

(Cabin doesn’t have internet, so I was actually worried about a smart tv disabling itself)

> It's such a piece of shit it only lets you play mp3s from a directory on flash drive.

That's doesn't seem a big problem if you use an external Kodi box. I'll be relocating in months and will likely buy a signage display if I can't find a new bigger enough non smart TV. I only use my current non smart TV for RF channels while everything else comes through a unlocked chromebox with Kodi. It plays everything and doesn't contain spyware or ads.

I mean, there's no reason you can't buy used.

(though, yes, it phenomenally sucks that you can't buy one new anymore)

My LCD TV doesn't even have a digital tuner built in. I have a separate (also not internet connected) box to receive OTA digital TV. It's "HD" in the sense of 1366x768, I think. It's probably around 15 years old, barely used.

What would you pay for it?

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