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General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will be gone soon. The same thing happen
by goku12 3y ago
General purpose desktop computing isn't dead yet. It's still available - but barely. Now is the time to save it, or it will be gone soon.
The same thing happened to TVs. There are nearly no 'dumb' TVs that doesn't do anything more than just display the video signal. All the 'smart' ('over-smart' is more appropriate) TVs out there take too long to start and they almost always phone home to their overlords. The really worrying part is how normalized it is. I remember someone here on HN contemptuously dismissing my concern, saying that dumb-TVs are called 'computer monitors'. How many affordable 'computer monitors' above 30 inch do you know? And give it enough time - even computer monitors will become 'smart monitors', unless something is done now.
- thatfrenchguy 3y agoI mean, any smart TV is a dumb tv once you don’t connect it to the internet?
- baq 3y agoStill takes too long to boot to display.
- goku12 3y agoTVs long ago used to take up to 10 seconds to startup because the electron gun at the back of the CRT needed time to heat up. The advent of TFT panels gave us the hope that that wait would be a thing of the past. Now instead we wait minutes for its spyware, adware and bloatware ridden OS to boot up and phone home. We're living is a world that's the opposite of what technology promised us.
- eps 3y agoFor now.
- WorldPeas 3y agowait until a technology like sidewalk(or heck, IOT-scale 5g with sim-less connection to data-herding servers)
- marcosdumay 3y agoUnless it refuses to turn on without the internet connection.
- maccard 3y agoWhat TV doesn't start without an internet connection?
- goku12 3y agoTV has no purpose connecting to internet in the first place. But that's the reality now. It's more or less guaranteed that this slippery slope will lead to TVs that won't start without an internet connection - and only such TVs soon afterwards.
- 20after4 3y agoJust wait. With time this will happen, sooner than later I'm sure.
- baq 3y agoYou misunderstood the intent. That’s exactly how to get a small dumb TV. A large dumb TV is called a digital signage display. Those even come with remotes!
- goku12 3y agoThe question really is, is it affordable? And how long before even that option disappears?
- bonzini 3y agoIt won't disappear because it's a different market. A digital signage display is a large computer monitor. It has a remote, and typically also an RS232 interface to communicate what is pressed on the remote (as an alternative to HDMI CEC).
- WorldPeas 3y agobut not everyone wants/is capable of buying a 150lb NEC tv made to resist vandalism and such, they just want a flimsy plastic panel that takes hdmi from their laptop and pushes it to an appreciably large 1080p panel
- maccard 3y agoI just had look on Amazon and there are 42 inch dumb TVs available for about $220. A 32" one is $175
- 20after4 3y agoI just looked at amazon and a 42" monitor is about $500 (for a decent quality one). Where do you find these "dumb TVs"?
- maccard 3y agohttps://amzn.eu/d/7A6vnjn https://amzn.eu/d/7A6vnjn - if I search for "non smart TV" on Amazon it's the second link. The first is ironically a £1000 smart OLED.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vinay_ys 3y agoIf you are big TV brand player, the way it works is you go to a contract manufacturer and say you want to do a TV. They will tell you what options you have – what sizes, features, quality levels etc (configuration) and at what price they will sell to _you_ at different order volumes and the timelines for them to deliver to you. The offer you get will not be same as the offer they make to a bigger player who is a more favored partner to them. They will tell you if you become big, you will get better deals. You come back home. Then, you do your market research and decide where in the market's price/feature/quality curve is an opportunity for you today and what is your 10 year strategy to become big. Then, you also find out someone is doing a higher quality product but somehow pricing it lower - they are cross-subsidizing it. In the recent decade that has been through data/ads deals. Then, you study what happened to those players who didn't do data/ads deals and launched the product at actual the price with some decent margin built-in. They didn't do so well. Consumers cared more about feature spec and price deals than about data/ads fine-print. A lot of the features are to do with software OS. Then you discover that the software OS vendor has lock-in contracts with the contract manufacturer. You want to use that manufacturer who has great quality TV hardware components, you don't really have a choice but to use that software vendor's OS that comes baked into the TV by the manufacturer and let them take your customer's data forever. That's the current world we are in.