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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

I think his point is based on the (very reasonable) assumption that an equivalent quality Smart TV is going to be more expensive, which isn't worth it in general since you're not using the features that cause the difference in cost.

There of course may be realities of the market to cause it to not work out this way, but it's a pretty sensible assumption.

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Otherwise-equivalent Smart TVs are usually less expensive than displays (whether TVs or monitors) without the "Smart" features. This is a matter probably largely of economies of scale -- because that's what manufacturers think the consumer market wants, that's what they make most of and flood consumer channels with, and dumb alternatives are a specialty product.

Good to know, thanks. I haven't bought a TV for about five years and I've never bought (or even been interested in) a Smart TV, for roughly the same reasons described here.

EDIT: hullo's comment below would seem to contradict this; 32" TVs from Samsung seem like a fair data point to look at (albeit just one data pt), since it's a very mainstream manufacturer and a non-niche size.

"Picking a manufacturer (Samsung) and size (32") at random, I see the smart TV for $499 and non-smart options for 219, 269, 299. http://www.samsung.com/us/video/tvs/all-products Just for example."

My last three "TVs" have been commercial display panels. These are the NEC panels that you see in the airport (turned on their side) for departure/arrival boards.

They are more expensive than a best buy model. Not terribly so, however, otherwise the airport couldn't buy 200 of them.

They are incredible displays.

How would one go about finding them? (search terms, manufacturers...)

"Commercial display panels NEC" led me to this: http://www.necdisplay.com/category/large-screen-displays

"Large format display" http://www.newegg.com/Large-Format-Displays/SubCategory/ID-6...

All else being equal, would I skip the smart features? Sure. You don't get that choice though. At least, I never have. Aspects like display technology, color reproduction, contrast, latency, etc are much more important to me than smart vs. dumb, and those things are how I make my decision.

That assumption is not reasonable at all. Not only are "dumb" TVs no cheaper, hardly anyone even sells them anymore.

Picking a manufacturer (Samsung) and size (32") at random, I see the smart TV for $499 and non-smart options for 219, 269, 299. http://www.samsung.com/us/video/tvs/all-products

Just for example.

I can get a 50" LG tv ("dumb"; just connect a Roku over HDMI) for $700 on Amazon.

I'm pretty sure you can't get a 2015 model LG that's 50" or larger that's not a Smart TV.

The cheapest 50" TV they have is $799 has interactivity. http://www.lg.com/us/tvs

Its not a direct comparison.

The Smart TV even without the "Smarts" are generally higher end TVs.

Though not indicated on the main screen the $299 option is actually a SmartTV if you click through. You have to get down to the $269 option to get to non-smart TV.

The difference between the $269 and $299 seems to be about the difference for putting a processor in a TV and making it smart....

(Note I don't make the claim that the SmartTVs are cheaper but for the most part its being absorbed in the cost of higher end devices so you get the Smarts "for free" on better sets)

Oh that's a good spot I missed the 299. But still $30 is the cost of a chromecast or fire stick, to the gp's original point.

I think you're confused about the meaning of the terms "reasonable" and "assumption". An assumption isn't unreasonable just because it turns out to be untrue. As I said, there may be realities of the market that invalidate the assumption (and apparently there are).

What makes an assumption unreasonable, in your opinion?

I'm not who you're replying too, but I'll try:

An assumption is reasonable if it follows logically from facts we know about the world to some conclusion. For example, cars with more features usually cost more than cars with fewer. A washing machine with a detergent dispenser and 11 different wash modes costs more than one with 3 modes and no dispenser. A thermostat that just sets the temperature and does nothing else will almost always be cheaper than one with wifi connectivity and a companion iOS app.

Based on that knowledge, its reasonable to assume that a TV with more features will cost more than one with fewer. This assumption is wrong of course, but it wasn't unreasonable.

So that means an assumption is unreasonable if there's no reason you'd make it in the first place.

There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. You can retroactively justify anything by twisting and cherry picking facts. A product with more features may cost more if it costs more to produce or customers are willing to pay more for it because they see it as more valuable. Neither of those applies to smart TVs.

> There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place.

Sure there is. 99% of everything else I've ever experienced in my life have had a positive correlation between features and price. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another product where—in general—more features are cheaper than fewer. Other than television sets, I cannot think of one right now. (Maybe if I spend some time on it, I can think of another) Therefore, knowing what I know about prices of things, it is totally reasonable to assume that TVs follow the pattern.

I don't mean to argue because basically I agree with you, but a great example of more features costing less is the average midrange AV receiver which probably offers a tuner, digital inputs, and some sort of DSP as well as multiple amplifiers for 5.1 or greater outputs, compared to a 2 channel stereo amp aimed at the audiophile market - which although it [i]may[/i] measure better, probably doesn't sound any better in most peoples living rooms.

For that 99% of everything else, those features were probably useful things that users wanted.

Perhaps a more concrete definition of an analogous concept would make this clearer: Are you familiar with the concept of a prior distribution[1]? The point of a prior is that, before you get any of the evidence, you can still have some sense of how likely each event is. If you asked me whether a microwave with more features would be more expensive, I would feel pretty comfortable saying "yea probably". As mentioned downthread, this is based on the fact that 99.9% of the time, in every single industry, products that are more functional will be more costly (all else held equal, obviously).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability

Like I said, that prior is wrong regardless about how comfortable you feel about it. The real question you should be saying yes to is whether a microwave with more USEFUL features would be more expensive. A microwave with the "feature" that "it has a 10% chance to self-destruct each time it finishes heating something" would cost less, since no matter how hard you try to spin that as a feature, a reasonable person would see it as a defect.

On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will believe it.

If you truly don't understand this distinction, then this whole conversation (indeed, this entire posting/thread) is hopelessly beyond your comprehension.

A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

> A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.

Depends on the market. Where I live, Smart TVs are easily about 2X the price for a similar "dumb" TV.

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