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Comment by neurostimulant | Hacker News Reader

Now that iOS and even Android start to actually care about privacy, smart tvs are the last bastion of hope for advertisers.

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And when will Apple enter the TV market? Seems ripe for them to make a killing.

Enter? They've been marketing a physical device called the AppleTV for 17 years.

He meant the actual TV, not the box.

Yes, I did. I thought that would have been obvious....

Apple is not a poster boy for privacy.

This feels like the perfect being the enemy of the good. What other company that actually sells products people want has a privacy record in even the same area code?

It sure isn’t Microsoft, Sony, Google, Samsung et al.

You pay premium for Apple because of advertised privacy. Yet every market analyst is well aware how they are expanding their ad business with very bold plans for the future. There is only 1 direction they can go - invasion of privacy.

They are not even trying hard to make it look like they are above ads revenue streams. Which is fine, as you mention everybody else is doing it in some way, but lets be honest here.

You're arguing facts not in evidence. It's not even a very compelling slippery slope fallacy.

Google has a terrible long-term privacy record, but over the last several years they've taken meaningful steps to improve on this, to the point that they are pretty good. They are one of the only big tech companies that provide controls to allow you to tune what sort of data they keep, to download it (take out) or outright delete it. They've even rolled out default settings such as (18-month location wipe). They're far from perfect of course, and I still wouldn't consider them "private" though I don't think any tech company is that. If you really want private, unfortunately right now you have to self-host most things.

Every company that stores any data about you has to have some form of privacy controls and data takeout by (EU) law

If it is really good, it will probably hurt their Apple Cinema Display market.

If it is not so good, what's the point?

There are also many regulations and market issues with making a panel TV, everything from standby power regulations, the tuner type (ATSC/DVB, etc.), warranty, accessibility requirements, etc. And even more issues with the ASICs that run TVs from companies like Amlogic/MediaTek/RealTek; Apple would either have to make a deal or build their own silicon IP for things like ATSC/DVB decoding, image scaling, audio decoding and processing (i.e. Dolby). And ecosystem issues like HDMI CEC, HDCP, etc.

If you side-step all of those issues and just bond a really nice display to an AppleTV and have no tuners, then you probably aren't adding much value beyond buying an LG/Sony and and AppleTV separately.

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