I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
You know, for your own protection of course. You wouldn't want to miss out on exciting content recommendation features and AI integration! Your life isn't complete without a constant guided tour of all the wonderful things surveillance capitalism has to offer, after all.
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
Ticks all my other boxes though, powers on as soon as my finger leaves the button on the remote, same with input switching and any other interactions with the OSD. Its completely braindead, just how I like it.
Oh, they also sent me the model with the touch digitizer installed. So I've got capacitive touch and pen input, it has a USB-B port on the side to connect to a computer.
That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.
It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
A much more fair retort is that an extra device to output video costs more, though I might argue that if you don't use the TV's built in system the manufacturer is losing ad revenue. So if you only use it as a normal TV you kinda are buying it subsidized by everyone else watching ads on theirs.
That way you can completely use it like a monitor instead of a TV.
Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.
That would let them glean information about you every time you use said app.
You’re still getting around this with a 3rd party device like an Apple TV for the most part but if it’s required to even turn it off or on it’ll be enough to sync any metadata that it holds
The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...
I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how people tolerate that.
I Piholed mine with an edge router and redirected port 53 traffic that didn’t come from the Pihole, back to the Pihole with a script.
However I’ve upgraded to a Dream machine pro, and haven’t worked out how to do that so just removed it from having any network access.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.
The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.
Apple left a large generational gap because they kept selling the HD for many years (until 2022) as an entry-level device alongside much more capable 4K models.
> ”it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection”
Yes, based on my observation this seems to be one of the biggest challenges people face with the AppleTV interface, along with accidentally changing the selection when they try to select it (because of the sensitive touch controls on the remote).
I don't think is the fault of the 3rd party devs, Apple seemed to start this and other devs followed their example.
I tend to make a small circle with my thumb in the center of the select button, or just slightly move it back and forth, to see what thing on the screen starts moving with me.
I hooked Peacock to the Apple TV app, and while it shows my next playing episode, launching from the Apple TV app just launches the Peacock app, which feels rather pointless.
And don't even get me started on the times where the app opens and plays OK. Then you go to ff/rw and all it will let you do is pause. So you have to re-start the app to get control. Then it forgets where you are.
And, of course, the crashes. I don't think I've ever seen an app crash this much. It makes me very worried for the codebase.
Technically, you could also configure the pihole to allow the specific hosts that the Paramount+ app needs to access. However, I found that there were many hosts, and they also change from time to time, so it can be annoying to keep them updated when the app starts crashing again.
Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.
On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple TV performance.
Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be very fast
And that’s assuming the apps are well written, which they are not.
Absolutely kills me.
No one else in the house notices when sound is from the shitbox tv speakers rather than the soundbar. It’s a high end Sony, and it’s sound quality is shameful.
Can we sacrifice a few cm of thinness and have some sound?
I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
The mute button is the next best thing.
Advertisements become much less irritating when silenced. I'm surprised so few people appear to mute advert breaks.
It really winds up one family member who works in TV advertising, so that's a bonus.
It was the bad update that made videos start playing as soon as you selected them, instead of going to the information page. I get the impression I wasn't the only person who complained; I suspect that any manager who sat down to watch TV that night probably twisted a few arms.
It's an LG 43UD79-B. According to LG's site[0], it's discontinued. I got it from Costco in 2017 for $550, but it was sold many places at the time.
Doing a quick glance at LG's current lineup, there isn't an obvious successor.
It looks like Amazon has 1 person selling it used[1], but in 6/10 condition and no remote, for double the price of new... While it looks the remote is also being sold places, it's pretty useless without the remote. The seller has sketchy ratings as well, I'd stay away.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-43UD79-B-4k-uhd-led-monito...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-LED-lit-Monitor-43UD79...
Every TV I have interacted with in recent years is slow and terrible, except for really old ones. The TVs are the problem, and we shouldn't be making excuses for that.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48 years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has never needed maintenance).
Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.
My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's something terribly wrong with domestic electronic appliances.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
This is how most people use their TVs these days (despite the issues with it). It's reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience.
Because if the answer is "not" then complaining about how your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly refusing to buy one additional device (like an Apple TV or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don't you think? Ornery even?
I agree that it is reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience but TV manufacturers have already made it abundantly clear, over the last decade and a half of smart TVs, that they don't give a damn what people like you and I think about how our TVs work, or that we get pissed off when they slow them down with bloatware and ads.
So the logical choice is to Not. Bloody. Let Them.
Literally, buy one other device - whatever suits your needs best (and they're all compact little things, not like the big ugly set top boxes of years gone by) - and your TV experience will immediately be significantly better.
Once you've set it up you won't even need two remotes: your Apple TV, or whatever, will turn the TV on and off for you, and control the volume, so you'll only need the remote for your it (or whatever device you've chosen).
The only time you'd need a second remote is if you have a cable or satellite box, or you're the kind of person who also has 7 games consoles of varying vintages and a bluray player plugged into your TV as well (which it doesn't sound like you have). We only watch on demand services so, if I weren't a fan of retrogames, we could get away with just the Apple TV and one remote. (The Bluray player barely sees any use, but I keep it around because we do still have some Blurays and DVDs for stuff that we really like and don't want to be beholden to streaming services for.)
(I should say, another alternative is to set up something like Pihole to filter the ads out, but that still doesn't help with crappy updates that slow your TV down. And if you use apps on your TV and don't keep them up to date, eventually they'll stop working, which isn't ideal either. Hence, again, back to the idea of a device to "drive" the TV, which runs the apps you want.)
No, I have plenty of other devices that update and remain useable. So do you.
I would describe your attitude that way though.
Sure, but your TV doesn’t behave like that and it won’t behave like that so why does it make sense to treat it as though it will?
So it's been a long time since I had to wrestle with the TV's built-in OS.
I just use the pleasant UI of the FireTV Stick to watch Netflix, Prime, Disney+, etc. on that decade+ old TV. That FireTV becomes sluggish if I keep multiple apps open, so I have learnt to exit out of an app before switching to the new one.
I may get a new FireTV stick this year, rather than splurging for a new TV, since the old TV is still doing well.
As the Americans say: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
My LG TV is more than a decade old (non-smart LED TV), the FireTV stick is around 6 years old.
But apart from the FireTV stick (whose remote controls the TV too) taking 15 seconds for a cold start (the TV tends to go to deep sleep mode after idle for long time or when switched off via remote), or 5 seconds for a warm start, the FireTV GUI is quite snappy thereafter (I can briskly move the cursor/selection across icons/thumbnails, menus and apps), till I switch it off again. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Discovery+, Apple TV - they all work well on this old setup.
You may want to uninstall some apps on the FireTV stick to give it some breathing space when it runs.
Try the FireTV stick on a PC monitor having HDMI input. If you face same issues there, then it may be time to buy a new FireTV stick or Chromecast, or splurge for a new smart TV.
Which of the two devices/companies is getting enshittified quicker?
The chromecast is much cheaper, so that’s a straight win.
Actually it is very much needed to say that. Manufacturers get away with crappy unbearably slow UIs even on expensive TVs because it's not something that gets enough consideration by reviewers or indeed buyers.
I thought that smart tv native usage was for gen. pop. only. Its been an ongoing conversation on this site for years at this point.
lol, it's not money. It's like windows 7 vs 11. each new generation of TVs have more intrusive bloated UIs.
It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.
Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.
Roku boots: 10 seconds
Meanwhile turn on soundbar: 3 seconds
Press Roku remote button: 3 seconds until it wakes up and repairs (remote still eats batteries)
Open streaming app: 5-10 seconds
Select profile: 3 seconds
Scroll about looking for show: 5-20 seconds, or a minute to type it in
Select the right episode: 3-10 seconds depending on if it's currently on the right season (somehow not always)
Start and buffering: 5-10 seconds
Ad: 20-40 seconds (depending on platform)
And that's all if you're concentrating on getting through it and the device isn't a laggy UI toxic waste dump. Some TVs you have to press each button and wait for each one to register.
At least there isn't an FBI copyright warning at the start I suppose (when you don't live in the US).
Except, anything written with a large JavaScript framework is allowed to be slow. In fact slow as syrup is strongly encouraged. To prove it just ask the developers. Mention it could be 8-50x faster just by not using their favorite framework and note the response. Even better, show them a proof of concept and take note of their unemotional objectivity.
This is embodiment of worse (for the customer) is better (for the business) adage.
This is a new and interesting insight to me. Can you please elaborate it a bit further, if you wish?
Constructive reply: What would be an approach to writing a large web frontend (large as in, many pages and controls) without using a large framework?
I'm asking this because I know how to do it in React but also how to do it "the old jQuery way" (or equivalently, using today's standardized builtins). Productivity is easily 100x larger with React.
edit: Ideally, together with a link to an example open-source application that does it that way, to understand how it works and feels at (code) scale.
My experience is with this: https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr (what I currently work on is quite similar, but it's not open source).
It works fine. Clients don't complain about the interface. The project has been going on for 20 years or so now, and doesn't need big refactors every time a dependency gets updated because it avoids dependencies.
I have explained this countless times. It rarely sinks in and quite often is met with hostility, so I don't bother any more. The problem is simple: its where people stake their career. Do they build their career upon writing original applications or upon using a tool? This difference is rather extreme.
By the way, without React shouldn't default to jQuery. If that is your perspective of reality you are already at the maxim of your potential.
I never claimed it does. I stated my experience to give context for my question for other solutions than React.
> The problem is simple: its where people stake their career
I meant my question to be about building a large frontend without a large framework, purely in technical terms. This has nothing to do with career choices.
also word, excel, ...
(which might actually be a large javascript framework on azure nowadays)
My TCL TV runs Android/Google TV, wakes from standby in 2s while also waking the surround in ~3s via HDMI CEC (and I don't need to hear anything until I've chosen something to play) so really it only take me 2s before I can start to open a streaming app (via a button on my remote) vs your 16s to get to the same point.
It's the choosing what to play that's the slow bit for me - every app puts what you were last watching in a different place, and not all apps notify Google TV so its own attempt at letting you resume is incomplete...
It also frustrates me that profiles streaming apps don't link to profiles for the OS (e.g. Google TV) - seems obvious to me that by now they should all be seamlessly linked together in a way that delivers the most personalised experience, instead of muddling up everyone's profiles and watch history!
"Wow"! we said. This is the future. Having to reboot the TV.
To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.
What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
Plus kids have a special motivation, much more urgent, in getting to know how to work that little plastic box full of buttons.
Different neighbors, being on different circuits, being on a line that's more likely to have storm damages, can make a lot of difference in quality of power delivery.
I've lived in places where the power practically never went out, never experienced undervolt situations, etc. I've then lived less than a mile away from the same place and experienced seemingly monthly issues of all the clocks being reset at random times when I come home. Living closer to things like hospitals, fire stations, emergency operations centers, etc. seem to give the best indication of power reliability, at least from my personal experiences.
But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.
who is right - no way to know, everyone can make their own judgement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE
The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.
I was surprised that kind of thing wasn't much more common earlier - it wasn't really any new tech breakthroughs so much as someone just going to the effort of building it.
The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier.
I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.
Back with Windows 3.11, it came with a paper thick manual telling you how to use the OS. You could read it, and understand it, and you only had to learn how to use the mouse (the difference between right-click and left-click, and how to double-click fast enough), and also knew that scrollbars looked like scrollbars at all times, buttons behaved a certain way at all times, and UI elements were visible and behaved the same at all times.
I think we've lost that with modern UIs and it's a shame.
I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover).
Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture.
With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of round-tripping going on with the streaming services I use through my dongle. They're always slow to both start the app and to start any actual streaming.
I found it amusing the other year when a youngster knew what the save button was, and recognised it, but didn't know what it was - a floppy disk (as he'd never seen one).
Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".
I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.
If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).
[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).
For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
The ‘tv remote as a cursor’ is rage inducing.
The AppleTV remote (current, not previous gen) is the least bad system I’ve come across.