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Comment by feld | Hacker News Reader

This is an odd precedent we're setting here...

But I'm not a fan of Smart TVs anyway because they will become disposable much more quickly.

It's not so much a choice between Smart TV vs. not Smart TV anymore. If you buy a TV today, it is very likely to be "smart". You can just decide to use the features or not (or when to stop using the features).

> If you buy a TV today, it is very likely to be "smart".

Of course, if you aren't using the built in receiver for OTA broadcasts, you don't really need a TV, you need a monitor. You can get commercial monitors that are just like "Smart TVs" without the smarts and the receiver that makes it a TV instead of a monitor, though you may have to look outside of the consumer-focused retailers that you think of when buying a TV.

I did this for years, but monitors are oddly more expensive than TVs.

All my TVs now are actual TVs, but they are more or less permanently set to HDMI1 input and all the other input source switching is handled externally. The exception being Netflix on the non-theater TVs, for that I usually use the on-TV Netflix client.

> The exception being Netflix on the non-theater TVs, for that I usually use the on-TV Netflix client.

And, if that fits what you want, great. OTOH, If someone is trying to avoid unwanted features of SMART TVs, some of which may not be separately opted-in and which generally rely on network access, providing network access to the SMART TV to allow the use of the on-TV Netflix client is self-defeating.

(I'm personally not so concerned about those features, though I've seen plenty of people who seem to be, I just want to avoid relying on SMART TV features because they are additional potential sources of failure, and because the "SMART" parts become outdated much faster than the display parts.)

But you can still get the TV cheaper. If you're using a monitor, that's implying all your sources are outside the TV anyway. You don't need to plug the TV into a network then.

So, the TV effectively becomes a monitor, but cheaper.

It's not odd that they are more expensive, monitors typically have higher refresh rates and faster response times. Both of which imply more powerful hardware for the monitor's driver.

Not these days (from what I've seen). I think it's mostly a supply/demand thing. Though some monitors do come with longer warranties, it's not worth the added cost.

TV's typically also have dramatically lower pixel density.

You can't get monitors in the same size as most TVs. They cap out in the 30-40 inch range.

Me neither, at least not in the way the smartness of the TV was intended to be used. My recently bought LG 60LB870V, the then-flagship of December 2014, running webOS 1.x.

It turned out to be a really incredibly slow OS with the TV occasionally crashing due to RAM shortage (having to reboot the TV). It's unbearable slow when "SIMPLINK" is on, ie forwarding remote control key presses like "play" over HDMI to my Kodi player, even for stuff that I don't think is forwarded (volume etc). It can without exaggeration take 10s from eg volum-up-press to volume increasing on the TV. Unbearable.

Fortunately, the smartness also allows me to control it programmatically. I've written a small node.js/javascript module here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lgtv so that I can control it over my local network.

I use it to have a webapp served by my media server to press the Totoro-button to switch to HDMI_1, volume = 10, Kodi start movie Totoro (my daughter loves it). Etc. To qoute Jim Carrey, "There's no end to the possibilities!" :)

How is that? An "obsolete" Smart TV is then just a dumb TV.

The user experience and interface will still suck unbelievably.

The embedded software might become outdated, but as long as they still have HDMI they'll always be externally upgradeable.

I figure so long as the software is stable, responsive, and does not depend on a backend somewhere to function, it's fine.

We are accustomed to constant updates, but it is hardly required. Software, so long as it is quality, can stand alone as an "appliance" for a long time.

My truck's onboard computers and smart radio come to mind. As does the intel 486 ROM burner in my college lab. The world marches forward, but they still do the job.

The biggest "risk" is probably just the advancement of media formats. My smart TV will probably support fewer of the most common formats come 2020.

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