Why Can’t You Buy a “Dumb TV?”

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Why is it so difficult to buy a "dumb TV" - that is, a TV without smart features built-in?

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[techquickie]

Use code "MAY24" to get up to 40% off international shipping until May 31st.

[Finkelfunk]

Imagine spending 2500$ on a TV just get a bunch of ads shown to you. Truly the best timelime.

[bluebirdsigma]

All I want is a "dumb mode" so that it boots to HDMI while the OS loads in the background, instead of making me wait for the TV to boot its OS so I can select HDMI from a menu.

[dragomirstefan]

Here’s one for the LTT team. Finding and testing affordable 4k dumb panels or dumb hospitality TVs

[justso]

Funnily several people I know used to buy whole new printers every time they ran out of ink, because there was a period of time, when a whole printer here was cheaper than a refill, which is ridiculous.

[taekwondomenik]

Here in Germany, there still is a brand that mainly sells "dumb TVs". They're called Metz. I did an internship at a small electronic business and a lot of older people just wanted to watch regular television, some Blu rays or DVDs. Also their remote still features a lot of buttons compared to newer ones. The blokes in the business always sad, pay the extra for them, because they don't break and people are used to the controls. Also they have the advantage of being made in Germany and are premium overall, they don't have cheap, bad sounding speakers, but rather a decent integrated soundbar. If you want a really good TV, I can always recommend them, even if you need a smart TV, they have them too.

[stuartgibson]

I watch all my content through the web browser on my laptop hooked up to my TV as a monitor. I haven't seen an ad for over a year. Absolute bliss.

[koalaunknown]

Even computer monitors aren’t safe anymore. My 34” QD-OLED Samsung monitor is also a “smart tv”. Thankfully, if you press skip enough times you can keep internet connection and whatnot turned off.

[thegamepadguru]

My Hisense U8K upon turning it on the first time, gives me the option of using the OS or being a dumb TV. More companies need to do this.

[ThangPlants]

We still have our dumb 1080p Sony TV that we're keeping unti it fully dies.

[zata]

What I wonder is why haven't we started jailbreaking/rooting these things yet, I cant imagine it'd be much harder to install a cracked os on a tv than it is on a phone.

[john.ellmaker]

If they review the best practically available dumb tv, I'll probably go out and buy one

[cheeseisgreat]

This is why the first thing I did when I got gifted a smart TV was remove the wifi module. If it broke the TV, I didn’t care, having the ability to connect to the internet or even so much as try to survey for networks was already broken as far as I was concerned. Am I paranoid? Maybe. Do these manufacturers have the financial incentive to do shady shit just to make ridiculous profits on something I already paid for? Also yes.

[cella]

I don't understand why advertising works anymore. In 2024, isn't everyone terrible jaded with the onslaught? I don't pay attention to 99.99% of ads. Do they get their revenue from the 0.01%?

[timothywells]

Even my G9 came with "smart features" and forced a EULA down my throat to "help" serve better adverts. Now windows gives me ads, Google give me ads, YouTube gives me ads, content creators give me ads, and my monitor want to give me ads 😭

[ScottGrammer]

(1) Buy whichever TV most closely serves your purposes. (2) Never connect it to the Internet.

On way to fool a smart TV is to connect it to your WiFi, and then "pause" the Internet connection to the TV using your WiFi router's control software. My two smart TV's (Roku and Samsung) have not seen the Internet since Roku pulled their little "click to agree or buy a new TV" stunt. They will never see the Internet again.

[nintendoatarikiller]

I have a 720p PLASMA TV from 2007 and it still works. It has HDMI and will never 'upgrade' to the latest TV.

[bkroeckel]

"buy a really large computer monitor"
**has to physically get up to power monitor on and off like it's the 50's**

[Alexandra-Rex]

You'd think there was a marked for someone to make actual dumb products like before. "Use our printer, and it will just print your stuff, even if you lack a color you're not going to use".

[oshadoo]

You're forgetting that TVs designed to receive HDTV signals already need some pretty heavy compute to decode the mpeg stream, that they're increasingly relying on simple microprocessors instead of specialized hardware to decode those signals, and that adding smart TV functionality is a matter of a bit more RAM and PROM, some software and some extra buttons on the remote. So it's a really easy add-in.