never, ever give a TV an internet connection, wifi password or dhcp lease.
I realize there are ads on the homescreen of an xbox series x, ps4 pro, ps5, etc but I would much rather deal with those than whatever shoddy operating system TV manufacturers put on their thing.
I have a thousand times more confidence that microsoft and sony will keep their OSes patched and up to date (they have a strong financial/self-interest incentive to do so, for anti piracy reasons) than the junk running on a TV.
Bought a samsung and a roku tv. I don't know which one it was - but, for one of them, I refused to install internet. And it had a red light that flashed like every 30-60 seconds. I looked up why? "Its the no internet" light and it couldnt be disabled.
I had to cover it up with a sticky note on my nice tv until I finally gave up.
> never, ever give a TV an internet connection, wifi password or dhcp lease.
The problem is that it’s becoming unavoidable. Right now the only oven with a good Consumer Reports rating requires a Wi-Fi connection, so it’s either get that model or another one with a significantly worse rating.
Or find a reviewer who values the same things you do?
I have to think there's an acceptable oven on the market that doesn't have a Wi-Fi requirement. I bought a GE Adora oven a few years ago and it has been exactly as perfectly uncomplicated an oven as I've ever wanted; it was even easy to replace the handle when I broke it off in a moment of poor judgement. It looks like those are still available, and don't require any Wi-Fi access.
> Right now the only oven with a good Consumer Reports rating requires a Wi-Fi connection, so it’s either get that model or another one with a significantly worse rating.
I guarantee you Wolf, Sub-Zero, and Viking do not require Wi-Fi connections.
> Right now the only oven with a good Consumer Reports rating requires a Wi-Fi connection
Is this some weird American only thing? I keep hearing on HN how everything requires wifi now, but in Australia, I couldn't find any major oven that had wifi at all, and only 14 out of 504 fridges on a popular appliances site (Appliances Online) had wifi at all.
I'd be interested to know what the options look like in other countries.
One thing I hate is when things like input switching are part of the TV OS. It can turn something that should be fast and easy into something slow and glitchy.
I want to skywrite this comment above Samsung's offices for a year.
I bought their brand-new-tech Quantum Dot OLED. I LOVE the screen, it's outperformed my every expectation... EXCEPT... switching inputs is a nightmare! How is that possible?!?! I still have no idea how to get to an input select screen. I use my Harmony remote to direct-select an input (impossible with the stock remote) or wait for the TV to say, "no signal, choose another input"
I'm completely flabbergasted at how ridiculous it is to do.
In many smart TVs, when you press the input button, it doesn't immediately pop up a mini OSD. It loads a program that can take as long as it does to load a streaming service's app. This program shows you ads, sometimes even inserts ads for streaming services in between the input sources you have to click over. This is before the time it actually takes for the input to change. With my TV, if I am on TV/Antenna, it takes me about 10 seconds from the time I first press the input button to when I can press the OK button on HDMI 4 which sends the command to switch inputs. The actual switching of the input takes about 1 second.
But not all. So, clearly it doesn't have to be below the OS level. I agree it needs to be quick, responsive and reliable, but that doesn't preclude it from being implemented in the OS.
To be fair I used the word "should", as in I believe that it would be best practice, at least from the perspective of user experience, to operate below the OS. If that were the case, input switching wouldn't be dependent on the speed or reliability of the OS. As you point out, it's not strictly necessary if the OS is responsive enough and reliable enough to begin with.
The fact that I have to wait for my TV to boot so that the 'input' button works in order to switch to the device I intended to use when I turned it on.
Mine takes 2-3s to come up, and at that point switching inputs takes pretty much only the time it takes for me to choose it. So, again. The problem is not that it has to be below the OS. The problem are crappy OSs and/or hardware.
Input switching on my TV doesn't even cross the Doherty threshold, or at least not in any way that I notice. And believe me, I get as irritated as anyone with laggy TV menus - which is one reason I refuse to buy Samsung at this point.
The speed and reliability of the OS. I should be able to change inputs even if the TV OS is unresponsive, which is not uncommon on some smart TVs. If the smart TVs you're using are fast enough and reliable enough that you aren't having issues then I don't think there would be any benefit to you.
On the contrary, I absolutely love the WebOS that came on my TV, and I use it (connected to the internet) regularly. I've often found myself watching YouTube and even browsing NPR and HN (using a TV remote as the only input device) on the TV rather than using my laptop, desktop, or even my iPhone. It's also open source [0] and you can develop your own software for it [1] without needing to submit that software to their app store [2] (though you can do that too [3]).
I bought an LG C2 earlier this year. The ads are impossible to remove, but sufficiently avoidable that I do not regret the purchase.
There is an option to run as a dumb panel, but I haven't tried using it that way.
Setting the TV up normally requires accepting a disconcerting number of EULAs. You can choose to decline some individual terms at the cost of disabling features like voice recognition, but others are required.
The TV's home screen is rife with advertisements, mainly in the form of pre-loaded apps and mandatory content sections like "Top Picks for You" or "Sports Alert." The Verge has screenshots at https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/11/22223767/lg-webos-6-tv-so.... These cannot all be hidden or moved below the fold.
The home screen ads really bothered me when I first unboxed the TV. It was new, and I wanted to explore everything it could do. Once the novelty wore off and I stopped giving a damn about the smart features, it stopped being a problem. For example: you never have to see the home screen. If you're not hooked up to cable or an antenna, the TV boots into a screensaver (a Rothko-esque slideshow by default) from which you can summon an app switcher and jump directly to Netflix / YouTube / etc. This skips the home screen altogether, so you never see those ads. System menus are free from ads to the best of my recollection.
I remain vaguely concerned about background data collection and telemetry.
Most (all?) of the ads can be disabled in the settings. The built-in web browser even includes ad-blocking and cookie blocking options.
General -> AI Service -> AI Recommendation: turn off "Who.Where.What?" and "Content Recommendations" and "Network-Based Personalization Recommendations"
General -> Home Settings: turn off "Home Promotion"
General -> Additional Settings: turn off "Live Plus" and turn on "Do Not Sell My Personal InformationA
General -> Additional Settings -> Advertisement: turn on "Limit AD Tracking"
My vizio runs so much better without a connection. It used to semi-regularly get into a state where the screen was blank even though the tv was on. Because it was a smart tv, powering it off wouldn't actually power cycle it. I had to pull the power cord to reset it.
Now I use a chromecast plugged into it for streaming. before that I used a ps4.
My previous Vizio tv botched chroma functionality for pc monitor for 2 years before getting it fixed. It doesn't allow downgrade. Never connect to wifi again.
My TCL will blink that if the WAP is up but the internet is down, but it takes a while for it to start blinking. I just put the TV on the slowest network i have, and i rarely use the TV anyhow. 90% of media consumption is on a 4K PC monitor, and 9.5% of the remaining is on a 720p projector. I wish that 1080p or 2k projectors were cheaper, but at ~$350-$500 a 720p projector is a really hard price/feature point to beat.
On the wall i painted with Silver Screen Behr paint, the pixels are about 1-2mm.
There's ads on consoles now? Wow... I feel like people would not have tolerated that 10 years ago.
I remember reading memes about how you have to "pledge" to the Mountain Dew or else you can't turn your console on... and that was comically exaggerated but we're certainly getting close...
+1. I bought a samsung premiere projector, and it's a very good product. But the first thing it did was prompting me for the wifi, and hell no.
It's offline, plugged to a real computer that has internet access and I skip the projector home page as quickly as I can to get to the laptop mirrored displays.
I realize there are ads on the homescreen of an xbox series x, ps4 pro, ps5, etc but I would much rather deal with those than whatever shoddy operating system TV manufacturers put on their thing.
I have a thousand times more confidence that microsoft and sony will keep their OSes patched and up to date (they have a strong financial/self-interest incentive to do so, for anti piracy reasons) than the junk running on a TV.