How did TVs get so cheap?
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
Years ago I got so fed up with the smart TV experience that I bought a $200 dumb TV at Walmart, only had one HDMI input and terminals for a local antenna - hooked an Apple TV into it and had such a good experience.
It is easy to lose sight of how much money is made by collecting data on people and advertising.
Audio is a separate challenge, I'm not sure what you'd do there. Do computer monitors have eARC outputs? None of the ones I have do. Again if you had an Apple TV you could pair it with a HomePod (or pair of them) to avoid the issue but that's a niche solution.
At this point (as opposed to a decade ago) there's arguably no difference between a TV and a monitor anymore outside of packaging and the bundling of a remote and input defaults.
I have a Sony Bravia with an Android stick and Samsung QLED with an Apple TV. Less ads-ish and spying, but not totally out of the walled gardens. Already have a Plex lifetime and shoved stuff on a RAID10 NAS, so I'm okay with it as-is. I like that remote UPnP-basted casting works, at least with my login. Maybe Jellyfin or Emby have slight advantages in some areas, but it's the devil you know™.
Something I just realized is TV companies can very accurately put a price point on a specific buyer - household size, TV watch time, content being watched, TV lifetime usage, etc and calculate how much the buyer is worth in their eyes.
profit_tv = sale_cost + lifespan_tv*ad_revenue_per_household - production_cost
> Windows laptops sold directly by Microsoft have less advertising and spyware
Really? It’s a little hard to believe. I’d think the easier thing to do is to put the same adware everywhere instead of segmenting out the MSStore-sold devices. Do you have a citation for this?
I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
This is one of the central theories behind Kartik Gada's ATOM concept. He may come across as a bit of crank to some, but he has some interesting ideas.
But what’s cause and what’s effect?
Things that get cheaper over time don’t need price regulation to ensure that people who need them can afford to buy them, for example.
I don't care how cheap TVs are if I have to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years.
Is that a problem? I've probably purchased 7 TVs over the decades and only had one fail (replaced under warranty).
I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy
Although in reality, I'd just go in my basement and get the leftover supplies ...
Alternatively, I could just buy a blank electrical cover (or a picture) and put it on the wall.
Quicker, also.
Businesses always claim “regulation makes prices higher” but deregulation has not resulted in cheaper goods over time in aggregate. Consumer electronics seem to be a pricing exception and I think it’s largely automation and outsourced production as the regulations haven’t changed substantially in some time.
This is a pretty straightforward example of the Baumol effect, where _anything_ bespoke (not manufactured) requiring a human is simply going to cost more. The materials for patching drywall/plaster are tiny, it's the cost of the person that is expensive because overall cost of living is rising. The cost of outsourced labor (which you can leverage when making a TV, but can't for local labor) also probably plays a role.
In fact, I bet you could find someone to fix the drywall/plaster much cheaper than the cost of a TV. You just won't like the quality of the work.
letting evil corps get away with anything leads to them jacking up prices anyways -- who would have guessed?
The most critical determinant of the cost of things is "do you absolutely have to do this in a Western country by people who are legally entitled to work there, and even worse, in or near a major city?"
I don't have references, but I suspect that the people working in the TV factory do not find that the TVs are cheaper than finding a local plasterer. The TVs can be easily imported to the West from somewhere cheaper. The labour cannot, and there's an entire regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping such labour expensive. So you see price rises in all the labour-intensive non-exportable industries; trades, healthcare, education, law enforcement, hospitality, and so on. While anything that can be put on a boat gets comparably cheaper.
(this is my variant on the Baumol Cost Disease argument, which is in the graph in the article already)
but I suspect that the people working in the TV factory do not find that the TVs are cheaper than finding a local plasterer
I suspect the new one would be cheaper.
Automation and economies of scale matter, not just labour costs.
> I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
Isn't that Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect), not regulation? As manufactured goods get cheaper, labor gets relatively expensive. The expensive part of patching a hole in a wall is not the materials, it's having a guy come and do that work. There's no opportunity for automation or economies of scale with having a guy come over to your house to deal with your specific situation, but there are tons of those in a factory.
An even cheaper way of covering the hole than a TV is to hang up a rough piece of drywall without competent installation.
Also, I'd be wary of quotes from "someone techy," tech people can be pretty shallow and stupid, and it's pretty obvious that whoever was said that quote was going for shock/cleverness and sacrificed truth and understanding.
and it's pretty obvious that whoever was said that quote was going for shock/cleverness and sacrificed truth and understanding
But ... Andreessen has elsewhere claimed it's due to regulation: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment
But ... more recently his firm has explained they know what Baumol's cost disease is: https://a16z.com/why-ac-is-cheap-but-ac-repair-is-a-luxury/
He does have his head up his ass, so I wouldn't be surprised [1]. However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.
[1] FFS, he really implies day care is expensive because regulation is preventing "technology [from] whipping through" the sector like it has in TV manufacturing. I don't want to live in his nightmare fantasy.
But in the spirit of deregulation and techno-utopianism, here's an idea to use technology to slash day care prices that's held back by evil government regulation: lock kids in padded rooms while their parents work. Maybe stick a TV on the wall playing Cocomelon. It requires no labor for supervision, and the kids can't get hurt because the room is padded. That's a "technological innovation" that will "push down prices while increasing quality," for certain definitions of "quality."
However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.
TFA goes into the industrial engineering efforts associated with LCD manufacturing, but I don't think those wins would have shown up without a huge market for TVs.
Now LCDs are used at effectively every scale - tiny embedded systems, watches, phones, tablets, laptop displays, monitors, TVs, projectors, and even billboards. CRTs can’t scale like that.
None of you are looking at this right. We were talking about how much space to ship one of them. And here you are talking about how thin the tv is when you stare and gawk at it, not the box it came in. Reddit-tier commentary.
Costco wasn’t selling 24” CRTs, though, they were selling 27” & higher up to projection. These were massive, maybe three to a palette at most. CRTs needed to get deeper as they got larger, so their packaging grew in all three dimensions. LCDs only get bigger in two dimensions.
Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office. It is a production to move it. I could fit at least four of the package boxes for the 27” monitor I just bought for my in laws in footprint of that display.
>The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I
That's what, to hang on the back of a minivan front seat for the kids to watch? Or a computer monitor? No one is buying televisions like that. Could you even find one retail that small?
>I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.
And both of those are comparable, are they not? That's about the max (non-gargantuan) television people get, and the 24" crt was pretty close to the max size back in the day.
>Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office.
You're being unfair in this comparison. That Trinitron isn't a tv is it, it's a monitor right? The CRT televisions were rarely Trinitrons, even most 25" televisions are half it's size. If you have to stoop to corner cases to win the argument, did you really win?
They got much bigger than that.
> That Trinitron isn't a tv is it,
You're just going to assume that? There were absolutely Trinitron TVs.
If there's anyone being uncharitable here, it's you.
And yet you didn't answer the question.
My 25” Trinitron is a TV. It’s no bigger than any other 25” TV of the time (maybe even a little smaller since it’s a late model) I’m being absolute genuine and trying to be as fair as possible.
I’ve spent a lot of time with TVs and monitors. I kept my CRT monitors for far too long because they had better resolution than any LCD panels well into the 2000s. I still have two CRTs for retro games and AV (the previously mentioned Trinitron and a beloved 12” PVM). I have to move them, find space for them, maintain them.
I’m not trying to win anything, just share my experience. I could easily fit inside of a 19” CRT box (curled up). I could barely cover my legs with a 19” LCD box.
So did CRT TVs.
The padding was probably a lower percentage of the volume, because they were honkin' great cubes to start with, but don't try to pretend that LCDs in boxes come to the same size as (or even remotely comparable to) equivalent-viewing-size CRTs in boxes.
It's not as if CRTs didn't also have package and padding.
"less bulky". I'm flabbergasted at the implication
CRTs got cheap too (relatively speaking), but the scale was smaller back then. The bulkiness and high power requirements of CRTs limited their use to a narrower set of applications, and the overall global economy was smaller. They never saw this scale.
Today the number of TVs plus commercial displays plus phones plus laptops plus gaming consoles plus cars plus consumer appliances with screens is just gigantic, and they all use flat panel displays. While there are different variations on flat panels there are ultimately only a few core technologies and there's a lot of overlap in how the fabrication process works for all of them. They are all delicate sandwiches of micro-electronics and light-modifying layers and various exotic materials that block, reflect, or emit light.
not all things.
Things that can scale are things that have a non-linear scaling production output vs input. For the LCDs (and semi-conductors), the area of the output is squared, if you increased the size of the production by a linear amount (let's say, the glass width). But the work required is not quadrupled!
Things that are linear in scaling - e.g., a burger cooked, does not scale the same way (at least, not for a McDonalds burger) - it's a one to-one, even if you tried to make it scale up by having more cooks/more machines etc. Cars, to a similar degree, but the fixed cost of a car factory/assembly line vastly out weight the lack of scaling i suppose, and so cars did get cheaper but not from the scaling manufacturing, but from cheaper components, and more automated steps etc.
Basically, we have been, since 2018 (I incorrectly wrote 2010 here earlier), only spreading out the same number of pixels on larger areas of glass, so the number of pixel components per unit area has decreased.
I have tried to price out 8K TV/monitors and they are horribly expensive (also not supported on MacOS). Probably both because of the larger number of components and we haven’t yet achieved economies of scale.
Only if you ignore that 4k entered and then became common in the consumer space since then, followed by the introduction of 8k.
> The units are “dollars per area-pixel”: price divided by screen area times the number of pixels
So it seems like it factors in the pixel density too
Economy of scale would be against us, but maybe there is a way to surpass it. Fun thought exercise :)
I have no idea how to solve this. The pressure to cash out just gets stronger as the business succeeds more. Even starting the "business" as a non-profit is no guarantee, as we've seen with OpenAI!
Pro-user EULAs just aren't popular because they limit future monetization paths for the company, but it sounds like that is exactly what you want.
1. the enshitification of smart devices would continue progressing and, at some point, our product would just be better and enough reason to migrate 2. a single, catastrophic privacy event would change the public perception on the importance of privacy and trusting your own devices, which would change the value perception of dumb appliances
Any one of those two would suffice to make the business viable, in my opinion.
What do you mean by that? Isn't that the "smart stuff" you want to remove?
Yes, most consumers would buy a $250 TV rather than a seemingly-equivalent $450 TV, but another $200 just to not be tracked and advertised to is really a small lift. Kind of surprising that there aren't options for this in market if the numbers are really that tight. Compare a cheap Windows laptop to a macbook -- yes, they're not really equivalent from a technical standpoint but to a lot of consumers they may effectively be equivalent as the "device my kid needs for school." But the price differences there will be much greater. Perhaps as much as $500 or more.
Instead, they'll wait for the revolt, and then sell the upgrade. Then they look like heroes for doing what people are asking for, instead of villains that cause the situation in the first place. They'll spin it as offering affordable TVs to those can't afford them without the advertisements, and no-ad TVs for those who are willing to pay the extra.
And most people will eat it up.
3-5 years is smartphone life. New TVs should easily last 10 years. My $600 1080p TV from 2016 is still in the living room. A subsequent $600 4K TV bought in 2020 is also fine. I don’t see what could prompt me to replace them until they break. The quality difference is negligible, especially with the garbage bitrate most streaming services provide.
I'm just now starting to feel like I should consider a new one for the living room, but it's far from the top of my list.
The "Idiot Box" box qualification is not without reason.
All that said, it's still odd there's not at least one boutique option for hobbyists.
If you're right handed then I assume a USB camera from the back-right can either detect a big colored sylus, or your hand pointing. A hacked wireless mouse/device for buttons?
I look at some large TVs of 2016 vintage being sold for surplus and I was shocked at how heavy they were. I don't have the specific numbers handy, but I recall they were >40 lbs heavier than I expected them to be compared to today's TVs.
This is not a rhetorical question — do I read FCC, something else? Use SDR?
763€ for LG OLED42C5, while cheapest current gen iphone is pushing 1k€.
If, as is asserted, telemetry is such a golden ore, getting uninterruped access to it would surely cover the cost, at least in some markets.
I'm not aware of any confirmed instance of this, so for now this is just an urban legend.
[1]https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
Digital signage shows the market is already solving this problem so if all this complaining is to mean anything people are talking about yet another new market that fits in between the smart TV price and the digital signage price
Also they were heavy, fragile and difficult to import. The components were usually shipped to the target countries and assembled there.
We must be around 10-15 generations in to LCD TVs at this point.
Compare the cost of a new Apple II or Commodore 64 system with a modern Chromebook.
The cheap stuff getting cheaper is all made in China so I don’t think socialism is the issue.
Also article uses 50” as a benchmark. Consumer moves towards larger sizes and OLED.
the world has never been cheap, we're just better at arbitrage now.
what did the ancient capitalists mean by this?
The houses as a structure aren’t going up in value (any more than the price of construction materials and labor has). It’s the land that’s appreciating faster than inflation in most cases you’re complaining about.
more expensive than chinese
as for salaries - yes indeed they are up. not every chinese laborer is a slave obviously, but many are - not usually for electronics directly though, more often for the inputs of such (energy and what not).
i'm surprised there's contention about this - it's all over the news.
How much more expensive? 5%? 50%? 200%?
That was an issue where I was visiting because basically 90% the non-retired adults were working on the coast, 2 days away, and let children with their grandparents all year round except for their vacations. Apparently that created a kind of 'lord of the fly' situation in some villages, but don't quote me on that, I didn't saw it myself. What I saw was the young there feeling abandoned and let down by the central and provincial government, and their parents.
[1] Virtually all the major mechanisms that can drive efficiency improvements — improving technology and overlapping S-curves, economies of scale (including geometric scaling effects), eliminating process steps, reducing variability and improving yield, advancing towards continuous process manufacturing — are on display hereit's literally what the graphs in the article say... increased efficiency and what I am saying are not in contention.
TVs are super famous as the economic example of a good getting cheaper in nominal terms every year as they get better specs. Because it’s such a strange phenomenon. You looking for cheaper real goods, opposed to nominal, misses half (or more) of why TVs are so interesting.
Why don’t you show us some other goods that are cheaper in nominal terms compared to the 90s “because China”?
Then, I noticed that some frozen salmon in our supermarket was mega cheap at €9/kg, as opposed to the more standard €14-16/kg, and the country of origin???? China.
ironically cocoa is a great example of my point though - it's not imported from china, so there isn't a huge cost reduction.
Food would probably be cheaper, if that was traded as freely as TVs. But since there seem to be good reasons to regulate prices that farmers allow to work, not every domain of production outsources environmental costs to non-citizens or nature in general.
Other countries, particularly China, are known for much laxer standards and even more timid enforcement of these - of course, the generations after ours will have to live with the contamination, but for now, they can produce for far, far lower costs than Western countries with environment and labor protection laws and decent enforcement.
And another thing... advertisers. Good luck finding a non-smart TV these days, you gotta pay a significant premium for what's known as "digital signage" (assuming that you can even get models actually usable). Normal consumer TVs and monitors? They're sold at a loss or near-loss price because the real profit is from the continuous (!) stream of ads over the life time of the device, plus analytics over the content that the users consume.
Resiliency is also often priced out - and food is actually the perfect example for that.
Remember the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? A lot of countries in Africa were pretty darn screwed - domestic industry had gone down the drain following mismanagement (e.g. Simbabwe) and/or Western donations (can't compete with free), so once Western donations dropped down after we reduced overproduction, they went for Ukraine who at the time was famous for its highly productive arable land that could supply wheat at probably the cheapest prices in the world.
But once the Russians invaded and farms had to close up shop (fields were contaminated, transportation infeasible, machinery destroyed, workers killed by acts of war or joining the army), the situation became very dire.
If all we do is regulate prices, then there’s still an incentive to despoil the environment if it lowers your costs.
What you want to do is to mandate prices on externalities – the pollution itself. That way people are still free to buy and sell TVs and to innovate new ways of manufacturing them, but the only way to avoid the cost of externalities is to generate fewer externalities - less pollution per TV – which is what we want.