7 ms·

I'd rather flip this solution on its head: why are our markets for consumer goods /so broken/ that there's no headroom for a startup making quality, 'not-smart'

• RL_Quine 4y ago
  The smart features of a TV subsidize its price. A "non smart" device manufacturer has to sell at a dramatically non competitive price because they aren't selling user data or flooding advertising into the content shown. Sitting on a shelf, who would buy a TV with less features for double or three times the price?
  • Doches 4y ago
    For TVs, absolutely, that's a hard value proposition to beat. But you can't tell me that there's anything like as much profit delta between 'dumb' and smart...refrigerators.
    • RL_Quine 4y ago
      There's a hot tub brand who include LTE radios in their hot tubs to ensure that they always have an analytics channel irrespective of what the user configures. Why on earth? It means they can target advertising for consumables and services. Same goes for fridges which need replacement filters, fresheners, whatever, you've just got to dupe the user into giving you internet connectivity, or accept the cost of putting a cellphone radio in your product.
      • Doches 4y ago
        That is amazing and bananas in equal measure, and I seriously hope it's true (in a sort of black mirror-esque way) -- it's just the perfect parody. And the perfect example! If I was choosing between two otherwise-equivalent hot tubs I would /definitely/ pay more for one without the ability to call home. Are there enough people who would also be willing to pay more, and pay enough more to make up the difference in lost advertising revenue? I guess...not?
      • dotancohen 4y ago
        > There's a hot tub brand who include LTE radios in their hot tubs Is there any disclosure that the device includes such a radio?
        • RL_Quine 4y ago
          No idea, I saw it on a list of "product success stories" for a IOT cellular provider.
          • c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
            I'm guessing you're referring to Particle?
        • dolmen 4y ago
          Mandatory registration to the FCC?
      • petre 4y ago
        you can still damage the LTE antenna or put aluminium tape on it.
        • mschuster91 4y ago
          Not if the antenna is somewhere that's filled up with epoxy for waterproofing.
      • l33t2328 4y ago
        Which hot tub?
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    If they also leave out the dsp, and settle on a standard form factor with no plastic clips and with standard mounts for all internal stuff. I'd buy in a heartbeat.
  • hulitu 4y ago
    To be honest that's what they want you to believe. Last time i opened a smart TV looked like the most expensive thing was the standing foot and the plastic frame. The rest was power supply (which was broken - planned - died just when warranty expired) and a cheap android computer. I think they cannot resist to the idea that if they have Android why not sell some ads.
    • rerx 4y ago
      Somehow I doubt the large OLED panel in my TV is cheaper than its little stand.
    • kasabali 4y ago
      Oh I really hate this meme because even folks at HN repeat it like a broken record though nobody even cared to back it with a real BOM analysis. Only source I've seen so far for this ridiculous claim is "an executive of Sony said so in an interview". Yeah, a really neutral source of information, indeed. 55" open cell panel costs less than $100 and this is by far the single most expensive component in a TV. So a $300 Walmart special Roku TV might needed to be subsidized a little, but doing the same on a fancy LG, Samsung or Sony would be purely out of greed.
      • thfuran 4y ago
        I think you're underestimating just how much money there is to be made after the sale. Vizio now makes more money on ads and data harvesting than on hardware sales.
    • dolmen 4y ago
      Netflix / Disney pre-installed on the smart TV are probably the features that allow the manufacturer to reduce the price thanks to subsidize from those subscription vendors.
      • rerx 4y ago
        Does Netflix (still) subsidize TV vendors to include their app? Or is it the case that TV vendors would not be able to sell their products if they didn't come with built-in Netflix? I read some representative from Nvidia Shield explaining that they were forced to add a Netflix button to their remote in 2019 because Netflix would no longer allow their app to be installed on devices without a dedicated button.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    I think you mean something like $20 more, and that's likely overshooting. Some smart TVs can milk money from subscription partnerships, but on a per-tv-sold basis it's not really that much.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    I've never seen any ads in my smart devices and I have a hard time seeing how the user data could be worth so much that dumb device startups can't even enter the market. Do you have any source with numbers on this? I mean, I can understand the value of user data from Facebook but a stove or a fridge? What exactly are they selling? Edit: realized now we're talking about TVs but still, is that data really worth that much?
    • thfuran 4y ago
      https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/328967-vizio-makes-2x-more-selling-ads-and-data-than-it-does-on-tvs https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/328967-vizio-makes-2...
  • alpaca128 4y ago
    > double or three times the price I'd like to see sources on that. Amazon's tablet is like $20 cheaper if you buy it with integrated ads. A TV will have a hard time showing so many ads through the day that it'll halve the price.
    • dagw 4y ago
      I'd like to see sources on that. I just checked a (Swedish) price comparison site and the cheapest 65" 4K TV currently available was literally less than half the price of the cheapest Not Smart TV. Also with Smart TVs I had a choice of over 200 different models, while with Not Smart TVs I had a choice of 2.
  • car_analogy 4y ago
    We don't know, because manufacturers made sure that doesn't happen. There is no equivalent, premium-priced privacy-respecting TVs sold next to "smart" ones. And they definitely don't advertise the user-hostile "smart" features, such as telemetry and forced ads, as prominently as the price. What we do know is that even the least price-sensitive consumers, that buy the most high-end TVs, aren't given the option: Buying a product knowing it has ads in it is one thing, but users on Reddit and elsewhere are understandably angry about ads suddenly being patched into their devices—especially in cases when these devices are multi-thousand-dollar 4K Sony televisions - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program-puts-a-row-of-ads-on-the-android-tv-home-screen/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/google-pilot-program...
    • est31 4y ago
      The least price sensitive people are also the most valuable people to sell ads for.
• silisili 4y ago
  Probably solely costs. A handful of companies own all the appliance brands, able to create components for pennies and they sure aren't sharing them with you and I. Appliance companies seem to be barely making margins anymore, so it's not like they're robbing you blind, more that a startup would need to create a simple device that is also twice the price of everyone else.
  • Doches 4y ago
    Would you pay extra for not-smart appliances? Because I sure would -- and have, at every opportunity I get. It's frustrating that there's not a market for uncomplicated, well-built, totally-lacking-in-smart-features appliances. If I have to replace e.g. a dead microwave, I would pay considerably /more/ for one that won't call home or auto-install firmware updates or tweet at my wife when I re-heat a mug of tea. You'd hope that there's be enough of a delta in that "pay more", and enough folks who would do so, to make a market. Shame it seems like there isn't.
    • silisili 4y ago
      No I get it completely, I would. And probably a lot of readers here would. Though admittedly I'd wait to see if the brand existed in a year, so I could get parts. But the problem seems to keep coming up that people like us just don't represent enough market share for it to be worth everyone's time. See also: US made hand tools. Everyone seems to yearn for the old Craftsman days, but not enough people want to pay that premium. While Harbor Freight seems ever expanding...
      • Doches 4y ago
        Yep, hand power tools are another perfect case. We're just vigorously agreeing with one another now, but I would really like to see the economics behind e.g. smart washing machines. I mean, it's not like Samsung just likes violating their customers' privacy for the hell of it -- there must be (considerable?) profit in it somewhere. It's just distressing that there increasingly doesn't seem to be a market /at all/ for non-smart appliances. I'll probably never buy a television again, since it seems you can't buy a decent non-smart panel without crossing into the enterprise (and adding an order of magnitude in price). And I'm not alone! How is there not a single manufacturer making a single modern non-smart LCD TV? Hell, call it the "HNTV" and expect to sell no more than...20,000? At 200€ in margin that's a 4m€ product line, surely worth throwing off given that the R&D is just removing hardware from an existing model?
• bushbaba 4y ago
  There is, just on the ultra high end and ultra low end. The mid-range has decided to leverage 'smart' features to compete on cost or shift buyers over.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  What you need is a white goods equivalent of Behringer, mass-producing "reproduction" 1970s Tricity Countess cookers and Indesit L8 washing machines and such.
• dagw 4y ago
  The core principal of the innovators dilemma is that as you move "up and to the right" prices increase leaving a space for cheaper competitors. I spoke to a person working at a small company doing a fancy piece of kitchen equipment about this once. According to him anyway doing an app was actually easier and cheaper to manufacture since A) it was less moving parts and less complexity and B) finding people who know how to program a really nice app is cheaper and easier than finding people who knew how to design nice physical controls with buttons and knobs.
• mschuster91 4y ago
  - People expect appliances to live for years if not decades, and many are not willing to trust a new brand for a multi-hundred-dollar expense - Producing and especially shipping and storing huge and/or heavy appliances is expensive AF, which means you need a lot of upfront capital for inventory and warehouses - Getting onto Amazon is easy, but almost no one buys a fridge on Amazon - which means you have to establish a relationship with brick-and-mortar retail, and that is difficult: the retailers expect free demonstration units for each location or subsidy for advertising, as well as have ridiculously long payment schedules (depending on whose rumors you listen to, some chains want up to 1 year of time from product delivery to payment due date!). Basically, it boils down to the question on how and where to get money to disrupt an industry that has enormous cash requirements, low margins and an extremely niche target demographic. Your best bet is a benevolent billionaire willing to put up cash for decades.
• skocznymroczny 4y ago
  It's "so broken" from a perspective of a privacy advocate or a tech oriented user. For casual users of these devices, a TV that doesn't support Prime Video/Netflix/HBOGO out of the box is "broken".
• maccard 4y ago
  That ship has sailed with TVs now but you can still buy high-end non-smart kitchen appliances from most manufacturers, Samsung included. Smart kitchen appliances are outrageously expensive (the Samsung smart fridge range is ~30% more expensive than their highest priced alternative based on a quick Google) so it's not like you're being forced to buy one of these.
• rapnie 4y ago
  A company offering a range of dumb household devices with a modern design but the sturdy quality of many of the machinery from my granny's days? The stuff that lasts a lifetime. I would pay good money for that.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  The Innovator's Dilemma is absolutely not about creating higher quality versions of products.