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Comment by ekropotin | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?

The specs and quality of the panel, backlighting (if applicable), and image processing. These days, the few "dumb" TVs that are still sold are either cheap and bad or are designed for signage use and aren't well suited for TV/movies/games relative to their mass-market smart cousins.

A smart TV used as a dumb TV alongside a quality streaming box (Apple TV or Nvidia Shield TV) or console gets you the best overall experience.

Not for everyone, I guess.

Many people, including myself, don’t want to buy “quality streaming box” just for watching Netflix or YouTube sporadically.

To each their own, but the good ones last a long time even if they’re a little pricey. As an example, the original Apple TV 4K which was released in 2017 is still quite serviceable and continues to receive updates even now. A unit purchased in 2017 for $179 will have worked out to $18/year assuming they’re still using it in 2027.

The cheapest Roku player at this moment is selling for $16, the plush model for $80.

So, you do have to eat that financial hit for the least-bad privacy option.

Right, but the Roku literally monitors what you watch 2x a second. They call it ACR: https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/acr-the-future-...

From my experience, TVs are not as ubiquitous as they used to be 10 years earlier.

However, one must acknowledge that you can now watch "TV" on almost all your devices.

There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days.

Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)

You get a much cheaper TV. The folks who manufacture the TV expect to make a certain amount of revenue from your data, so they price this into the cost of the TV. This saves you from having to spend more money on a commercial display that often has a worse panel.

One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want.

You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.

The best (in terms of image quality) consumer displays on the market right now are OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. But they’re also “Smart” TVs.

I keep mine disconnected and use an external media box (AppleTV 4K).

Several Sony models are also very good, being built with Samsung panels and their own in-house image processing which is some of the best in the industry. Their TVs run Android and support offline firmware updates, too, which is why they're usually what I buy.

Which Sony line?

I usually get Samsung and now I'm nervous about nag screens to connect to the Internet.

I usually buy midrange to high end Sony Bravias. Don’t know as much about the lower end models.

Well, there's little choice for TVs without smart features these days. Especially if you're wanting certain quality and other features.

What you do is you should never do is connect your tv to the internet. You connect something you control and can turn off if you don't like it, like say a google youtube tv dongle, or apple tv. You can unplug them if you don't like them.

If you connect your tv to wifi, it can spy on you all the time. It can upload info on what you watch even if you used an external google tv puck to watch tv. It can see what you type on the screen if say you use it for say a monitor. There are reports of people deleting networking info but the tvs occasionally connecting back even though they deleted wifi info. You have to get a new network name to block them.

It's much much better to connect an external device, and if not that then use an ethernet cable to connect, because you can physically remove it.

Because the vast majority of people use whatever their tv came with these days in terms of smart tv connections, they don't set privacy settings. There's every reason for the tv makers to keep spying on you. If you have an external device their is motivation for them to not make you angry - but it's true that they can spy on you.

I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents).

This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.

The point is I don’t want my TV, my refrigerator, my toaster, my dishwasher, or my washing machine to be “smart” or to have any AI or internet connectivity.

These all have a very simple job to do, and there’s absolutely zero value-add to the smart edge software nonsense.

I may want sometimes to use my TV for watching something (I know, sounds wild), and I don’t want to buy additional piece of hardware for that.

Then go ahead? Not sure why you're so surprised that some of us don't like running spyware on our devices.

I do have some use-cases for a tv to be 'smart'. It's on/off trigger from a smartphone and casting anything you like from YT/Spotify.

It would make sense for a washing machine to be smart/have ai if it could detect clothes types and suggest a washing regime or warn you that selected regime can damage them. It'll also be nice to be able to schedule the washing so for ex. it's done when you get at home from work. For dishwasher - maybe somehow detect stuff that's incompatible with dishwasher and warn you?

I do also see a point in having a smart fridge that would detect products that expire based on some qr codes printed on them, otherwise idk...

Those aren't real problems for most people, though. I've never damaged a piece of clothing and I only use a few programs. It's obvious what you can put in the dishwasher. And expiry dates don't mean anything. Food is usually fine to eat long after the expiry or best before date. It's easy to see if someone is bad because the color, texture, smell and taste change.

Those examples seem like they would be useful for mentally disabled people. Not trying to be a dick here, but someone with declining cognitive abilities is more likely to put a sock in the dishwasher, to wash delicate clothing at 90 °C or to forget food in the fridge for months.

It reminds me of those items primarily designed for physically disabled people that (used to) be advertised for normal people on infomercials because the market for disabled people wasn't big enough.

welp, since nowadays a lot of clothing is some synth garbage, it's not that critical compared to washing some quality woolens, especially if washing instructions are gone. Expiry dates are still an indicator for food expiration, especially for animal products. Yes, for honey/salt it doesn't make sense. These are nice to have things that i'm sure will eventually be implemented in some way. To me it sounds a bit similar with that dropbox meme - yes, you can do everything 'manually', but some automation will definitely help. And as always, with many products it's actually correct to assume people don't think that much about how to use it, the more intuitive and automated is the process, the more ppl will have it easier

It's more that they don't sell dumb TVs anymore, so you have to simulate it yourself by preventing Internet access.

Now, whether it won't nag you to connect with pop ups is a different question.

The ability to own a TV at all, since even the cheaper sets now have this nonsense built right in. Loosely I think the idea is to subsidize the cost of the hardware with the marketing deals, but I don't actually know.

It's often much cheaper than an equivalent "dumb" or commercial tv screen

Mine's in the living room hooked up to a gaming PC, and I don't watch TV/movies.

> What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?

The difficulty in finding an affordable TV without smart functionality alone means that you're most likely buying a smart TV.

I yet again bought a Samsung smart tv (despite having sworn never to do so again..) and I'm never letting it connect to the internet after what happened to the last one.

The difficulty of buying a dumb TV.

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