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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: January 26th, 2025
  • Sorry, being on c/technology I made some assumptions here. I was mostly talking to people who want a dumb tv and hook up an external smart device to it, like a media centre, an android box, or an iptv box.

    This is generally agreed to be a better solution as it lets you actually control your media stack, and it provides longevity. A regular smart tv will be outdated and slow within a few years, while a dumb tv can last maybe three times longer unless something inside it actually fails.

  • Just an FYI to anyone looking, you can still actually buy mostly-dumb TVs.

    I was looking for a TV to buy for my parents last year and it seemed like the only options available were “smart TVs,” and I begrudgingly ended up buying a Philips ambilight unit. I was pleasantly surprised by how dumb the Titan OS on it was. Sure, it had WiFi, and the usual Netflix and other streaming apps, but I just didn’t connect it to the WiFi, and from then on it was just a souped up version of their 15 year old TV. It did ask to be connected to WiFi, but stopped after being told no a few times.

    I’m sure other manufacturers have similar “smart on paper, but dumb in reality” OSes, as it seems to mostly be a cost cutting exercise. The hardware in the TV would need to be more expensive to run an actual smart platform. So the manufacturers just make a low end thing that ticks the right boxes to be able to call it smart for marketing, thinking that’s what people want.