I ran my old 2004 Samsung television into the ground: the EL backlight was so worn out that the picture had large dark holes in it, and the TV would take 20 minutes to warm up and display something.
And today it wouldn’t start at all anymore. It’s deader than a dead dodo. But hey, 20 years for a modern TV ain’t bad. I’m pretty pleased with that.
So I went to the supermarket to find the cheapest set I could find. I asked the salesman if they had a cheap, but most importantly NON-SMART TV - thinking non-smart TVs are probably the cheapest of them all, if they still existed at all.
The man said “We have this dumb 43” TV here, but it’s the last one, and then we won’t get anymore dumb TVs for 3 months."
I looked at the price and it was - gasp - $20 MORE than the cheapest Android-encumbered smart TV of the same size.
I asked the man how come and he said “Well, dumb TVs are hard to get and they sell almost immediately. So they’re worth more than the smart ones.”
Wow. So people actually WANT dumb TVs and are willing to pay a premium for em. It means attitudes towards the value of privacy are changing and that’s great!
Many smart TVs still give you popups telling you to connect to the internet or they simply refuse work without connection. There’s not a very good way to tell if any smart TV you get will do this ahead of time without looking over reviews, and even then many people just connect their TVs anyway so it might not show up there either.
I’d prefer to just have a display that works as a display from the start and not have to worry about it.
Ask the sales rep if it works without internet, and if they’re wrong, demand a refund.