In fact, even the ideal HN approved setup is just a smart TV where the online bit is a removable stick on the back. The average consumer just doesn’t care about being able to swap it out.
The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing.
For example, I do not care if a TV is smart or dumb. All I care is how quickly it turns on because I am connecting it to an Apple TV anyway. Even as a person who would rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV, my actions continue to support smart TV manufacturers because I am not willing to spend the time and effort required to seek out dumb TVs, since I have already found an acceptable solution.
The much simpler explanation is that TVs plastered with ads and surveillance are more profitable to companies.
Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive advantage in a razor thin profit margin business, which does not seem likely.
Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically,
sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they
had an option for dumb
The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for.
But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending choices) only leads to optimal outcomes when the "voters" are sufficently knowledgeable in terms of both general domain knowledge and the choices themselves.
For all but the simplest choices (say, a choice between a bucket with a hole in the bottom and a bucket without a hole in the bottom) this is difficult.
There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV.
I wonder what sort of reaction you have when a successful, legally approved medicine turns out to cause death or injury in the long run, or merely proves to be ineffective. Or when a specific model of car develops problems after a couple of years.
Do you say, "well... this is clearly what consumers voted for?"
You read a few TV reviews, see that LG OLEDs have been the best choice for many years. Hard to get this wrong.
Maybe, but it has been a decade since smart TVs became prevalent, and I would bet everything I have that if you put a dumb TV for sale next to a smart TV in Costco, no matter how shitty the software on the smart TV is, the smart TV will be chosen enough times that the dumb TV maker goes out of business.
This is not about what should the consumer do. This is about what the consumer will do. And they will choose to pay $30 less in exchange for giving all their viewing data to the TV manufacturer. Try to educate them otherwise, I doubt it will be successful.
There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever.
There is also more data out there than ever
before in history about TVs, but I doubt most
people would ever care enough to read in depth
reviews on rtings or whatever.
There's also the larger issue of whether it's reasonable for consumers to do so. Educated, informed consumers are always the goal, but at some point this is not reasonable.
1. Consumers can't be experts on everything. Cars, prescription eyeglasses, medicine, home repairs, computers, shoes - there are simply not enough hours in one's life to become a domain expert at everything.
2. A lot of people are, frankly, not the brightest. As the saying goes, half of the people in the world are below average. I don't mean this insultingly, in fact: quite the opposite. Human beings are human beings. We are all worthy of dignity and respect. But being an uber-savvy consumer is less practical for some.
Also known as the market for lemons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Akerlof's paper shows how prices can determine the quality of goods traded on the market. Low prices drive away sellers of high-quality goods, leaving only lemons behind. In 2001, Akerlof, along with Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz, jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for their research on issues related to asymmetric information.
Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick.
So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this but don't understand why fiddling with two devices would be preferable to having one device where everything is built-in.
So far that's a reasonable stance, I believe - especially if you don't know all the tracking smart TV vendors already have done. This might change though if ads and other overtly user-hostile features are rolled out more widely.
Even after spending tens of thousands on home theatre equipment I struggle to understand why I should want to use some kind of stick to watch netflix from.
Never a great assumption really.
> working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV.
Companies are focused on maximizing profit. Demand is secondary.
The hardware cost difference between a smart TV today and a dumb TV is negligible, but the loss of years of spying on you and serving you ads isn't.
Isn't that the same across the entire world?
/s
The same argument has been posted multiple times for small phones. Yet, every time apple releases small phone, they are disappointed in sales.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se...
- Most Apple users want larger screens, which means larger phones; or
- Small Apple phones are not small enough, so there's no point.
About the second point, that's where I am. I've been looking forward to a USB-C iPhone Mini. That was until I actually tried to use a Mini. It's smaller than the regular size iPhone, but still very hard to use single-hand as I have small hands. I want something the size of the iPhone 5. The Mini is just not small enough to make the small screen worth it.
I’m not sure I have actually ever seen an iPhone mini in the wild. It seems to be almost evenly split between the pro and the pro max.
Back before the turn of the century, Micropose released Falcon 4.0, arguably one of the best military flight sims. It was complex, had good graphics for the day, had a vibrant community of users, a vibrant aftermarket equipment ecosystem (HOTAS, foot pedals etc). I love playing it, and couldn't wait until better and better computers came out that could make the graphics photorealistic. I also played EF2000 which let you fly the Eurofighter. Same game idea, a bit less accurate, and a bit more user friendly.
Fast forward two decades and the military flightsim field is basically dead. People will tell you to try MS Flight Sim, but that's definitely not the same.
Why did this happen? Might have been dotcom fallout; might have been just a small niche application field. Who knows? The market moved on and now it's a wasteland. Perhaps VR will revive it since it would add a great deal of situational awareness.
In the end, just because a small group wants something (like dumb TVs or Milsims) doesn't mean that companies will fill the niche.
The correct explanation is probably that since modern TVs are inherently digital devices the most sensible way to implement them is as computers running TV software, and once you are building your TV that way the only difference between a dumb TV and a smart TV is the software.
Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.
"Smart" sets tended to move from the top of the market downward. This meant that if I wanted a "non-smart" set in a given size, it was likely to be the lower-end product-- often with fewer inputs, a lower-grade panel, or from a firm with an inferior reputation for quality.
This makes it difficult to de-conflate if people were buying a smart TV because they wanted the smart features, or the panel/connectivity/brand reputation.
It does make it a good thing for them. Which begs the question: why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist.
> they love also facebook
Ah, yes. The old "facebook is as bad as cigarettes" trope. It feels a lot like the claims around TV in the 70s and 80s. "It's rotting people's brains!" But society kept on chugging. It is one thing to object to Facebook's business model. It is another entirely to deem it "Bad For You". Billions of people like using the product and it hasn't hurt their lives. In fact, it has improved them.
It used to be that one of the strengths of our economic system was that you could find something to meet your needs even if your needs weren't the same as the majority.
Are you thinking of an example where that once was true but has changed? I'm open to examples but can't myself think of any that are analogous.
It’s not impossible to not own a smart TV, it’s just the mass market caters to what the vast majority want. Outside of hacker news, no one considers smart TVs harmful.
I consider cars harmful and yet hacker news gets up in arms when I propose banning them from cities.
All sorts of ways to dispute this assertion, the most easy probably just to point to the existence of the multi-trillion dollar advertising industry
I don't believe Facebook or TV are equivalent to cocaine. I don't think your argument is made in good faith.
Exactly. You were making a broad claim that it is "paternalistic and elitist" to decide what is "good for you" vs "bad for you". If it is paternalistic and elitist in some cases, but appropriate in others, then don't we need a way to figure out what side of that line various things fall on?
This is the comment to which I was responding. As I see it, there are two premises here which both have to be accepted (i.e. it is an "AND" not an "OR"):
1) Facebook/TV is analogous to cocaine
2) Cocaine is bad for you
If I reject that Facebook/TV is analogous to cocaine, I reject the entire thing. I was not making a broad claim about people's autonomy vs. paternalism. I was making a narrow claim in relation to two (at worst) benign things: smart TVs and Facebook.
I'm not clear on what your argument is here. Are you:
* denying that there is a fact of the matter about whether, for any item X, X is beneficial or harmful?
* asserting that something's being beneficial or harmful has no meaning apart from signifying present-day user preference?
* merely asserting that users fairly reliably tend to prefer what is good for them, and avoid what is bad for them?
> Billions of people like using the product and it hasn't hurt their lives. In fact, it has improved them.
It sounds like you are making a case here that Facebook is beneficial because it improves the lives of its users—am I understanding that correctly?
> Why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves?
Is that the same as bad? What is this zealotry against paternalism and elitism? Perhaps you could focus more on outcomes than some social engineering crusade you have, deciding that certain philosophies are automatically "bad".
This ignores that companies pour billions into advertising, fake research and lobbying to influence consumer behavior.
It also ignores network effects and lack of choice: if all your friends are in Facebook and there isn't a viable alternative to socialize, you don't have much of a choice, besides being left out (which may not be such a bad option but may also make you miss valuable socialization).
Making an algorithm to addict me is arguably pretty evil though.
My point is, I don't think many love them, I think they don't notice until it's too late and then they don't think about it too hard and just figure that's how the tv works.
(And I don't think what characterizes a smart tv is just the option of apps and streaming. This could be fine if done in an actual consumer friendly way. It's the other crap an upstream comment mentions)
This is not a defense of Samsung, but something you can try if you're stuck with it: While the Samsung remotes have slimmed down quite a bit, at least on my TV it still responds to the buttons the old more fully-sized remote controls had. If you get a universal remote and program it for Samsung TVs, you may find you get a lot of the functionality back that your remote is missing.
I can't speak for every year's TV; mine's a few years old now. But you may already have a universal remote just lying around, in which case this is really cheap to try.
Manufacturers definitely jumped on the chance to add software and an internet connection to TVs. Why sell a product once, when you can do that and then sell your customers to ad agencies?
I can't understand what anyone involved in the production of this monstrosity was thinking. It's a gigantic failure at the level of product design, product manufacturing, and house furnishing.
There is not even any "convenience" aspect to attaching your oven to a microwave.
But they saw the vertical integration possibilities and took advantage of it here. I'm not sure you are even getting a hardware discount to view those ads.
The gp never said anything about what consumers want, it's talking about the motives behind development direction. Features are not added because consumers ask for them: demand comes later.
Big businesses chronically underestimate consumers, don't try to teach them anything, and don't give them options for fear of confusing them. They forget everyone who works for them and their partners or makes the things they consume are also the consumers they abuse.
You're mistaking TV producers' desire to capture more of the market pie and invade our privacy with actual consumer demand.
Yes I am aware some "smart" TVs are incredibly bad(I wouldn't buy a Samsung having read the reviews of many different models) but yeah, having a dumb TV+ extra devices just to stream to seems like a hassle.
You're absolutely right. And I've personally capitulate to this reality...
The way that I see it is that there is really no way around this problem except through disconnected-media, over-the-air or homebrew/hacker/open-source solutions. None of these completely satisfy my media cravings.
So however foolish it may be, I still go with the "stick on the back" approach despite their appetite for all my information, because I still trust Apple, Google, Amazon... WAY more than all of these mysterious IPs pointing back to somewhere in Shenzhen.
What would I do with a dumb TV without apps? Only watch broadcast TV? Drag my laptop in? Pay as much as the TV itself for a media center PC that probably won't be as reliable and snappy ad Android?