4 ms·

But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The much simpler explanation is that TVs plastered with ads and

But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The much simpler explanation is that TVs plastered with ads and surveillance are more profitable to companies.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive advantage in a razor thin profit margin business, which does not seem likely.
- mrjin 5y ago
  They do. But the thing is that they work for the TV vendors instead of consumers and also if all vendors are moving to the same direction, there is virtually no choice for consumers.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There is no choice because there is insufficient profit. In an industry with tiny profit margins, if there was margin to be had, surely someone would jump on it.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb This is one of those areas where consumerism/capitalism trips over itself and leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for. But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending choices) only leads to optimal outcomes when the "voters" are sufficently knowledgeable in terms of both general domain knowledge and the choices themselves. For all but the simplest choices (say, a choice between a bucket with a hole in the bottom and a bucket without a hole in the bottom) this is difficult. There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. I wonder what sort of reaction you have when a successful, legally approved medicine turns out to cause death or injury in the long run, or merely proves to be ineffective. Or when a specific model of car develops problems after a couple of years. Do you say, "well... this is clearly what consumers voted for?"
  - rosndo 5y ago
    > There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. You read a few TV reviews, see that LG OLEDs have been the best choice for many years. Hard to get this wrong.
    - Kye 5y ago
      This works until a fresh MBA or PE firm takes over and decides to pump and dump, and the quality craters quicker than the reputation.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. Maybe, but it has been a decade since smart TVs became prevalent, and I would bet everything I have that if you put a dumb TV for sale next to a smart TV in Costco, no matter how shitty the software on the smart TV is, the smart TV will be chosen enough times that the dumb TV maker goes out of business. This is not about what should the consumer do. This is about what the consumer will do. And they will choose to pay $30 less in exchange for giving all their viewing data to the TV manufacturer. Try to educate them otherwise, I doubt it will be successful. There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Right. Capitalism often leads to suboptimal outcomes (everybody owns a TV somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "downright terrible") because there's no reasonable way to know better, so consumers choose based on the one thing everybody understands: price. There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever. You can read all of the reviews you like, but the conclusion is the same: you effectively cannot buy a non-smart TV now. There's also the larger issue of whether it's reasonable for consumers to do so. Educated, informed consumers are always the goal, but at some point this is not reasonable. 1. Consumers can't be experts on everything. Cars, prescription eyeglasses, medicine, home repairs, computers, shoes - there are simply not enough hours in one's life to become a domain expert at everything. 2. A lot of people are, frankly, not the brightest. As the saying goes, half of the people in the world are below average. I don't mean this insultingly, in fact: quite the opposite. Human beings are human beings. We are all worthy of dignity and respect. But being an uber-savvy consumer is less practical for some.
- xg15 5y ago
  Would be interesting to know why consumers want smart TVs so much. Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick. So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this but don't understand why fiddling with two devices would be preferable to having one device where everything is built-in. So far that's a reasonable stance, I believe - especially if you don't know all the tracking smart TV vendors already have done. This might change though if ads and other overtly user-hostile features are rolled out more widely.
  - rosndo 5y ago
    Consumers want to be able to just plug in their TV and press the Netflix button, nothing wrong with that. Even after spending tens of thousands on home theatre equipment I struggle to understand why I should want to use some kind of stick to watch netflix from.
    - iamevn 5y ago
      Why would you want a TV to be needlessly tied to an online service that can be turned off tomorrow? When Netflix stops providing its streaming service (or makes breaking changes to its API) a TV with Netflix support integrated now is wasting compute, menu space, physical buttons on remotes, etc. on a dead service. I would expect just about every TV to outlast Netflix unless it's treated poorly.
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    Personally, I'm really into cable management and hate clutter. Having one less external device to plug in helps with that. It's not like a Roku or Apple TV or Fire Stick can't track you and show ads in all the same ways a Smart TV can, so it's hard for me to see the downside. Since you have to login to most of these services anyway, even if you're watching Netflix on a Linux laptop, they're still tracking you. I guess at least Samsung isn't tracking you on top of Netflix if you're just watching on a dumb monitor, but frankly, the way to handle that should be, if market-based, Smart TV providers that don't do content recognition and interest-based advertising, and if that doesn't work, legal regulation that bans abusive practices. We shouldn't be stuck with 80s technology forever because devices with integrated computers will inevitably be used for spying.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > I assume there are capable people Never a great assumption really. > working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Companies are focused on maximizing profit. Demand is secondary. The hardware cost difference between a smart TV today and a dumb TV is negligible, but the loss of years of spying on you and serving you ads isn't.
- kwatsonafter 5y ago
  I love how you refer to buyers as, "voting."
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    Citizens United says that $1 = 1 vote, right? Isn't that the same across the entire world? /s
KptMarchewa 5y ago
>But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The same argument has been posted multiple times for small phones. Yet, every time apple releases small phone, they are disappointed in sales. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se-production/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se...
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  A couple possibilities come to mind: - Most Apple users want larger screens, which means larger phones; or - Small Apple phones are not small enough, so there's no point. About the second point, that's where I am. I've been looking forward to a USB-C iPhone Mini. That was until I actually tried to use a Mini. It's smaller than the regular size iPhone, but still very hard to use single-hand as I have small hands. I want something the size of the iPhone 5. The Mini is just not small enough to make the small screen worth it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Gigachad 5y ago
  A good rule of thumb is that it hacker news claims there is a huge unserved market for some product, there is almost certainly no real demand for it outside of this website. I’m not sure I have actually ever seen an iPhone mini in the wild. It seems to be almost evenly split between the pro and the pro max.
greedo 5y ago
The free market doesn't always evolve to meet consumer demand, especially when the demand is low. Back before the turn of the century, Micropose released Falcon 4.0, arguably one of the best military flight sims. It was complex, had good graphics for the day, had a vibrant community of users, a vibrant aftermarket equipment ecosystem (HOTAS, foot pedals etc). I love playing it, and couldn't wait until better and better computers came out that could make the graphics photorealistic. I also played EF2000 which let you fly the Eurofighter. Same game idea, a bit less accurate, and a bit more user friendly. Fast forward two decades and the military flightsim field is basically dead. People will tell you to try MS Flight Sim, but that's definitely not the same. Why did this happen? Might have been dotcom fallout; might have been just a small niche application field. Who knows? The market moved on and now it's a wasteland. Perhaps VR will revive it since it would add a great deal of situational awareness. In the end, just because a small group wants something (like dumb TVs or Milsims) doesn't mean that companies will fill the niche.
tzs 5y ago
Smart TVs pretty much completely displaced dumb TVs in the consumer market long before it occurred to anyone to use them for ads or surveillance. The correct explanation is probably that since modern TVs are inherently digital devices the most sensible way to implement them is as computers running TV software, and once you are building your TV that way the only difference between a dumb TV and a smart TV is the software.
PolygonSheep 5y ago
> But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  How much of a conclusion can we draw from that market period, though? "Smart" sets tended to move from the top of the market downward. This meant that if I wanted a "non-smart" set in a given size, it was likely to be the lower-end product-- often with fewer inputs, a lower-grade panel, or from a firm with an inferior reputation for quality. This makes it difficult to de-conflate if people were buying a smart TV because they wanted the smart features, or the panel/connectivity/brand reputation.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

I assume there are capable people working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb. The alternative is all the manufacturers simultaneously pulled all dumb TVs out of the market even though selling them would provide a competitive advantage in a razor thin profit margin business, which does not seem likely.

mrjin 5y ago
They do. But the thing is that they work for the TV vendors instead of consumers and also if all vendors are moving to the same direction, there is virtually no choice for consumers.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There is no choice because there is insufficient profit. In an industry with tiny profit margins, if there was margin to be had, surely someone would jump on it.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb This is one of those areas where consumerism/capitalism trips over itself and leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for. But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending choices) only leads to optimal outcomes when the "voters" are sufficently knowledgeable in terms of both general domain knowledge and the choices themselves. For all but the simplest choices (say, a choice between a bucket with a hole in the bottom and a bucket without a hole in the bottom) this is difficult. There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. I wonder what sort of reaction you have when a successful, legally approved medicine turns out to cause death or injury in the long run, or merely proves to be ineffective. Or when a specific model of car develops problems after a couple of years. Do you say, "well... this is clearly what consumers voted for?"
- rosndo 5y ago
  > There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. You read a few TV reviews, see that LG OLEDs have been the best choice for many years. Hard to get this wrong.
  - Kye 5y ago
    This works until a fresh MBA or PE firm takes over and decides to pump and dump, and the quality craters quicker than the reputation.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. Maybe, but it has been a decade since smart TVs became prevalent, and I would bet everything I have that if you put a dumb TV for sale next to a smart TV in Costco, no matter how shitty the software on the smart TV is, the smart TV will be chosen enough times that the dumb TV maker goes out of business. This is not about what should the consumer do. This is about what the consumer will do. And they will choose to pay $30 less in exchange for giving all their viewing data to the TV manufacturer. Try to educate them otherwise, I doubt it will be successful. There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Right. Capitalism often leads to suboptimal outcomes (everybody owns a TV somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "downright terrible") because there's no reasonable way to know better, so consumers choose based on the one thing everybody understands: price. There is also more data out there than ever before in history about TVs, but I doubt most people would ever care enough to read in depth reviews on rtings or whatever. You can read all of the reviews you like, but the conclusion is the same: you effectively cannot buy a non-smart TV now. There's also the larger issue of whether it's reasonable for consumers to do so. Educated, informed consumers are always the goal, but at some point this is not reasonable. 1. Consumers can't be experts on everything. Cars, prescription eyeglasses, medicine, home repairs, computers, shoes - there are simply not enough hours in one's life to become a domain expert at everything. 2. A lot of people are, frankly, not the brightest. As the saying goes, half of the people in the world are below average. I don't mean this insultingly, in fact: quite the opposite. Human beings are human beings. We are all worthy of dignity and respect. But being an uber-savvy consumer is less practical for some.
xg15 5y ago
Would be interesting to know why consumers want smart TVs so much. Some smart TV features are indeed necessary if you want to watch anything via streaming (i.e. any halfway relevant modern series). But as GP said, you can usually get those via some kind of HDMI stick. So one explanation might be that most people want to watch Netflix but don't know this is possible with a dumb TV + stick as well. Or they know this but don't understand why fiddling with two devices would be preferable to having one device where everything is built-in. So far that's a reasonable stance, I believe - especially if you don't know all the tracking smart TV vendors already have done. This might change though if ads and other overtly user-hostile features are rolled out more widely.
- rosndo 5y ago
  Consumers want to be able to just plug in their TV and press the Netflix button, nothing wrong with that. Even after spending tens of thousands on home theatre equipment I struggle to understand why I should want to use some kind of stick to watch netflix from.
  - iamevn 5y ago
    Why would you want a TV to be needlessly tied to an online service that can be turned off tomorrow? When Netflix stops providing its streaming service (or makes breaking changes to its API) a TV with Netflix support integrated now is wasting compute, menu space, physical buttons on remotes, etc. on a dead service. I would expect just about every TV to outlast Netflix unless it's treated poorly.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Personally, I'm really into cable management and hate clutter. Having one less external device to plug in helps with that. It's not like a Roku or Apple TV or Fire Stick can't track you and show ads in all the same ways a Smart TV can, so it's hard for me to see the downside. Since you have to login to most of these services anyway, even if you're watching Netflix on a Linux laptop, they're still tracking you. I guess at least Samsung isn't tracking you on top of Netflix if you're just watching on a dumb monitor, but frankly, the way to handle that should be, if market-based, Smart TV providers that don't do content recognition and interest-based advertising, and if that doesn't work, legal regulation that bans abusive practices. We shouldn't be stuck with 80s technology forever because devices with integrated computers will inevitably be used for spying.
TomSwirly 5y ago
> I assume there are capable people Never a great assumption really. > working at these large TV companies who can ascertain reasonably well what kind of demand there is for a dumb TV. Companies are focused on maximizing profit. Demand is secondary. The hardware cost difference between a smart TV today and a dumb TV is negligible, but the loss of years of spying on you and serving you ads isn't.
kwatsonafter 5y ago
I love how you refer to buyers as, "voting."
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Citizens United says that $1 = 1 vote, right? Isn't that the same across the entire world? /s

KptMarchewa 5y ago

>But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The same argument has been posted multiple times for small phones. Yet, every time apple releases small phone, they are disappointed in sales. https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se-production/ https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/28/apple-cutting-iphone-se...

cassianoleal 5y ago
A couple possibilities come to mind: - Most Apple users want larger screens, which means larger phones; or - Small Apple phones are not small enough, so there's no point. About the second point, that's where I am. I've been looking forward to a USB-C iPhone Mini. That was until I actually tried to use a Mini. It's smaller than the regular size iPhone, but still very hard to use single-hand as I have small hands. I want something the size of the iPhone 5. The Mini is just not small enough to make the small screen worth it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Gigachad 5y ago
A good rule of thumb is that it hacker news claims there is a huge unserved market for some product, there is almost certainly no real demand for it outside of this website. I’m not sure I have actually ever seen an iPhone mini in the wild. It seems to be almost evenly split between the pro and the pro max.

greedo 5y ago

The free market doesn't always evolve to meet consumer demand, especially when the demand is low. Back before the turn of the century, Micropose released Falcon 4.0, arguably one of the best military flight sims. It was complex, had good graphics for the day, had a vibrant community of users, a vibrant aftermarket equipment ecosystem (HOTAS, foot pedals etc). I love playing it, and couldn't wait until better and better computers came out that could make the graphics photorealistic. I also played EF2000 which let you fly the Eurofighter. Same game idea, a bit less accurate, and a bit more user friendly. Fast forward two decades and the military flightsim field is basically dead. People will tell you to try MS Flight Sim, but that's definitely not the same. Why did this happen? Might have been dotcom fallout; might have been just a small niche application field. Who knows? The market moved on and now it's a wasteland. Perhaps VR will revive it since it would add a great deal of situational awareness. In the end, just because a small group wants something (like dumb TVs or Milsims) doesn't mean that companies will fill the niche.

tzs 5y ago

Smart TVs pretty much completely displaced dumb TVs in the consumer market long before it occurred to anyone to use them for ads or surveillance. The correct explanation is probably that since modern TVs are inherently digital devices the most sensible way to implement them is as computers running TV software, and once you are building your TV that way the only difference between a dumb TV and a smart TV is the software.

PolygonSheep 5y ago

> But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? Because there was a period of several years overlap where both smart and non-smart TVs were available. If smart TVs had been a sales flop they would have been killed off like 3D TVs were. 3D TVs were being pushed hard ~10 years ago. It was supposed to be the next hot thing. But it flopped and has been all but forgotten about. Smart TV could have easily ended up the same way.

hakfoo 5y ago
How much of a conclusion can we draw from that market period, though? "Smart" sets tended to move from the top of the market downward. This meant that if I wanted a "non-smart" set in a given size, it was likely to be the lower-end product-- often with fewer inputs, a lower-grade panel, or from a firm with an inferior reputation for quality. This makes it difficult to de-conflate if people were buying a smart TV because they wanted the smart features, or the panel/connectivity/brand reputation.