You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during the 21st century and manufactured goods getting less expensive.
As gross as the business is, I do appreciate all the people who blindly agree to all the data mining, privacy violating agreements on their shiny new TVs because they’re a lot of the reason why I can get a 77 inch OLED for so cheap. Manufacturers like LG, Sony and Samsung make some great hardware but their software is worse than Bonzi Buddy.
But yeah, I disable every bit of “smart” and AI functionality (replace it with an Apple TV or something that isn’t loaded with ads and constantly phoning home) and set the location to Albania (which also has the benefit of fully blocking some other “features” from even appearing as an option.
While reading this comment, I’ve realized that like 15 years ago I was dreaming of such a world of cheap devices, partially paid off by their users creating entropy for some deus-ex-machina big data thing that everyone needs. Those dreams had such a retrofuturistic flavor.
I mean, were this done in a way preventing personalized spying, could be nice.
We finally had to break down and accept a smart TV as our last purchase. I didn’t want anything like that on my network. It never gets updates, it never talks to home, it never asks me to agree to anything. The way a display should be.
I do have a few IOT monitors, but they are relegated to the banishment VLAN and are unaware there is anything else on network in the house.
For those who want an dumb TV, you want to shop for a commercial signage display. It’s what a TV should be.
Projectors are also a good option if you want a huge picture with a simple display.
You can use pretty much any smart TV dumbly. The most obvious way to do so is to just not connect it to the internet, but if you want it on the network for certain things (like home automation), just don’t agree to the bullshit when you first power it on, create a login, or enable any of the ad-tracking junk disguised as features like “live TV plus” (which is often hidden across multiple menus). The Home Screen for it will forever look like a generic menu begging you to configure your TV, but if you have other stuff plugged into it you’ll hardly ever have to see it.
To really be sure you can use a raspberry pi running a pi-hole server to see if it’s phoning home at all. My LG does nothing online except when I have it pull an update in the rare instance that one comes out with an improvement I care about.
Using a digital signage screen is an interesting suggestion that comes up often, but if you’re a home theater junkie you might have trouble finding one of those at the same level of quality as the best smart TVs at a comparable price. There’s always a trade off to find between what you’re looking for, what you’re willing to deal with, and what you can work around.
Not an issue I’ve seen with LG at least. Their OS is bad for the reasons I mentioned (apart from perfectly good standard “dumb” TV controls), but the hardware is great.
A TV just bricking basic functionality because it’s not on the internet would probably be grounds for a class action lawsuit here.
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And the cheapest components combined with shortcuts that cause early failure.
As gross as the business is, I do appreciate all the people who blindly agree to all the data mining, privacy violating agreements on their shiny new TVs because they’re a lot of the reason why I can get a 77 inch OLED for so cheap. Manufacturers like LG, Sony and Samsung make some great hardware but their software is worse than Bonzi Buddy.
But yeah, I disable every bit of “smart” and AI functionality (replace it with an Apple TV or something that isn’t loaded with ads and constantly phoning home) and set the location to Albania (which also has the benefit of fully blocking some other “features” from even appearing as an option.
While reading this comment, I’ve realized that like 15 years ago I was dreaming of such a world of cheap devices, partially paid off by their users creating entropy for some deus-ex-machina big data thing that everyone needs. Those dreams had such a retrofuturistic flavor.
I mean, were this done in a way preventing personalized spying, could be nice.
We finally had to break down and accept a smart TV as our last purchase. I didn’t want anything like that on my network. It never gets updates, it never talks to home, it never asks me to agree to anything. The way a display should be.
I do have a few IOT monitors, but they are relegated to the banishment VLAN and are unaware there is anything else on network in the house.
For those who want an dumb TV, you want to shop for a commercial signage display. It’s what a TV should be.
Projectors are also a good option if you want a huge picture with a simple display.
Did you have to shop carefully for a smart TV that you can use dumbly?
You can use pretty much any smart TV dumbly. The most obvious way to do so is to just not connect it to the internet, but if you want it on the network for certain things (like home automation), just don’t agree to the bullshit when you first power it on, create a login, or enable any of the ad-tracking junk disguised as features like “live TV plus” (which is often hidden across multiple menus). The Home Screen for it will forever look like a generic menu begging you to configure your TV, but if you have other stuff plugged into it you’ll hardly ever have to see it.
To really be sure you can use a raspberry pi running a pi-hole server to see if it’s phoning home at all. My LG does nothing online except when I have it pull an update in the rare instance that one comes out with an improvement I care about.
Using a digital signage screen is an interesting suggestion that comes up often, but if you’re a home theater junkie you might have trouble finding one of those at the same level of quality as the best smart TVs at a comparable price. There’s always a trade off to find between what you’re looking for, what you’re willing to deal with, and what you can work around.
I ask because I’ve heard that some TVs brick themselves if you don’t connect to internet and wasn’t sure how common that was.
Not an issue I’ve seen with LG at least. Their OS is bad for the reasons I mentioned (apart from perfectly good standard “dumb” TV controls), but the hardware is great.
A TV just bricking basic functionality because it’s not on the internet would probably be grounds for a class action lawsuit here.
There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.
Need to source commercial monitors, used for menus.