buy your tv, don't connect to wifi. connect to your device of choice, done.
trying to avoid smart tvs is so silly, as you basically exclude nearly all of the good ones.
1. Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.
2. Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.
3. Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network.
4. Automatic WiFi connections. TVs might connect to open or partnered WiFi networks without telling the user. Hard to know without an audit.
5. Accidental WiFi connections. Settings menus might be unintuitive (or deceptive) enough to trick users into joining WiFi networks accidentally.
6. Future data leaks. TVs might be recording data and saving it to internal storage. The next owner of the TV could connect it to a network, and years of stored data would be leaked. Again, hard to know without an audit.
There is no more a “smart TV tax” than a “Windows tax”. Smart TV manufactures make money via selling user data that more than offsets the $20 BOM for the smart TV components just like computer OEMs make money installing Windows crapware.
> Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.
What unused hardware? When the built in smarts go obsolete, you buy an external device and connect.
> Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network
That’s true and it was happening a lot when we first moved into our condotel (condo that’s rented out like a hotel when we aren’t there and we get half the proceeds) and when we stay in hotels. I bought a wifi to wifi bridge to have a private network.
2. Indeed
3. You can disable this
5. Disable
6. Disable
Basically most of your criticism is resolved if you never use the wifi to begin with, and all apply to any hypothetical wifi enabled device you connect to a dumb TV, anyway.
I'm pretty sure the NAND is degrading in my 2015 Sony Bravia, its bordering on unusable with its hangs, jitters and crashes.
I barely trust any manufacturer to produce consumer grade goods that actually do their job properly, the best way to get more stuff working right is to narrow the featureset and hope that they're not completely incompetent.
If you do a full hard reset of my particular TV, it can't even run its own OOTB setup smoothly. Sony have got it playing some ambient chimes in the background, but the audio constantly breaks up and glitches.
Its got an 8 core processor and it can't even handle audio playback in a bit of the UI which should have had heavy QA.
do you know how long it takes to turn on an iPhone? you may have a stroke if I tell you.
It’s totally fine that you have different priorities and values than us, but that doesn’t invalidate ours.