I believe you can still get "dumb" flatscreens, but they're getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their "smart" brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.
The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special "Nielson family", fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.
People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn't expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn't answer that text fast enough. It's misery.
I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it's not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It's a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.
We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don't need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.
Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.
Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people's phones, suddenly, it's normal, and people will just expect it.
I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can't take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn't even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don't. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They're in every pocket. They're much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.
I hope I'm just melodramatic, or something.
Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That's my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.
Raspberry pi with Kodi hooked up to a projector and a NAS serving files works well for me.
When I completely replaced my PC, I intended to use my old PC as a media box. But in reality, I've basically used my Chromecast for everything. One of these days I'll probably want to watch something that isn't on one of my streaming sites, but I've been surprisingly resistant to that so far.
Chromecast is the ideal smart device so far, for me. No ads or anything. I use my phone as a remote and basically every video app supports it easily. Open app, press cast, select what I want to play. Exactly what a smart TV should have been like.
What type of Chromecast do you use? I recently bought a Chromecast Ultra for a new TV after being happy with a secondhand one for years (3rd gen, I think). The difference in UI was such a disappointing step down. I don't want a home screen with apps and ads, I just want something I can stream to from my phone! And I can't say for certain, but it also feels like I get more ads on YouTube compared to using the older Chromecast.
My only beef with Chromecast is I feel like they are designed to die after 2 years. I've gone through three now; it always seems like right around the 2-year mark, it starts having issues staying connected to the network. But I keep buying them because, like you said, it's basically the ideal smart device.
Careful though, some smart TVs actually list in the ToS where they'll take screen captures of what you're watching for "informational purposes", make sure you have all data collection turned off anyway even if you don't use it as such.
The ethernet cable goes to the computer, not the TV.
This is the future that Stallman warned us about. They mocked him and said it didn't matter. It's not going to get better until everyone stops buying TVs with spyware built in.
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching. Self hosted is an option these days. But that means not being lazy. And people are really lazy.
Vote with your wallet
When are we going to finally accept that this is nothing but a delusion? How many failed boycotts over and over will it take?
I agree with the sentiment, but really more than a boycott where you're purposefully not buying something to hurt it, it's more like people opting out of something that's just bad. It does take a while of being put through the mud for most people to realize and more importantly take action, but eventually it happens. If you're following video game stuff, look at what happened with Baldur's Gate in contrast with Overwatch 2. We need some more time (unfortunately) and one daring competitor to offer the catalyst product.
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching.
I never bought one but I can't do anything about people who have AirBnB's who buy them or hotels that install them in every room.
You sound triggered.
We have the burdon of knowledge. We know too much. We were there when a TV turned on and you were presented with channels. Some fuzzy some clear. Sometimes your had to wiggle the antenna. The point is, there is a generation that has never known that. They have only seen a smart tv. They don't know the greener grass. TV makers are waiting for us to die and the next generation to just accept their shitty product as normal. I hate it. I hate it so much.
The most egregious action I've seen was from a Vizio smart TV I bought several years ago. It shipped with a simple remote control, and a tablet with a control app preinstalled. One day I turned the TV on and was notified that in order to use the updated UI I would need to reach out to support to order (and pay for!) a new remote that had additional buttons.
Screw TVs, digital signage is the way. With every new smart TV I am more convinced that I'm just going to buy this display from this Jeff Geerling video
I'm not an advocate for smart TVs, but my experience has been different. I found a deal for an 86 inch LG, and it's been nothing but smooth for me. No advertising built into the os, always has the apps I use right on the bar. The air mouse onnthe remote is reminiscent of owning a wii.
Because the vast majority of times people complain about this stuff, they have no idea what they're talking about.
If you buy a nice TV and spend 2 seconds going thru the options you won't have a single issue OP is complaining about.
Edit:
Apparently OP banned me for saying their meme doesn't make sense...
The only thing that a "cheap" TV would do is slow down overtime, because it's cheap and has the absolute bare minimum processing speed.
You need that processing speed to properly up sample to 4k from streaming.
If you want a cheap one, buy a decent 1080p so it doesn't have to upsample.
Rtings.com is a good resource.
But it should be common sense that buying a cheap product will give you poorer results.
Why should you have to buy a nice TV for this issue to not be an issue? Why should shitty TVs have built-in advertising and glacially slow "smart" functions? Either don't include that as TV software or fix it.
Nearly hucked my Vizio out last night as I discovered that between last football season and today they have hidden the broadcast channels I receive with my antenna, in their "Free+" offerings and no longer show the channel number when you rotate between them.
This also means that when you choose "Antenna" from the input menu, you get around 15 seconds of black screen while it loads an informative slide about the change and then demands you press the OK button to finish loading their program
Then, to change the channel you must open their fiddly "broadcast guide" and use it to choose the channel you want to watch (after 15 second loading delay for the guide and another 5 second delay once you've picked a channel.
To change the TV from the Nintendo game to Fox took me 10 minutes. Then I realized Fox was showing the Packers game and I needed CBS and it took me 5 more minutes to find the menu again and find CBS.
Just last February this exact same action took maybe 20 seconds? Turn TV on, change input to Antenna, flip channels manually.
I hope everyone reading this knows that you can just not connect a "Smart" TV to the internet. Leave it as a "dumb" TV.
Get a separate device like a Roku or AppleTV or Amazon Fire or whatever. The garbage hardware that TV manufacturers slap inside a TV so they can advertise its "smart" features will always be inferior to a purpose built external device.
To say nothing of the security implications of having an unpatched probably unsupported IoT device running on your network for years.
For those with similar problems, use pihole dns to effectively block all that bullshit
Also, do NOT buy a Samsung TV, it's the worst offender of them all. Nothing but bad experiences with itl
Don't buy Samsung anything. Their hardware is junk. They used to be okay, but they decided years ago that they want to be an advertising company, not a hardware company, so they push cheap crap that is used solely as data harvesting and ad delivery devices. Even their home appliances spy on you and break down a few years later.
My 2013 Highest End Samsung was pretty much E-Waste three years later. 80% of the Apps broken, no new Apps for new services.
UTTER BULLSHIT.
I plugged in a FireTV 4k which was on Sale for €25. Perfectly supported since many years. TONS of software, channels and so on. Best buy ever.
When I had to buy a new TV for my bed room I bought a "dump" monitor and plugged a FireTV in.
