This is going to sound incredibly cynical, but I'm convinced the primary reason for Smart TVs to exist is to sell TVs. My current TV is 17 years old. It's 720

This is going to sound incredibly cynical, but I'm convinced the primary reason for Smart TVs to exist is to sell TVs. My current TV is 17 years old. It's 720p, plasma, and yes I want to replace it. But functionally it's as good as the day I bought it. I've used it with appletvs since the first generation - if you're not into apple, there's android and amazon boxes and sticks too. When my appletv goes EOL, I'll buy another $99 appletv - and they're usually supported for about 5 years. I do fancy upgrading to 4k and all that jazz, but every time I go looking at my options - they're all "smart". They're rarely supported for 5 years, let alone 17. Obviously yes you're going to airgap it once it stops being supported in 2-3 years, but having to click through one OS to get to my STB's OS sounds like such an ugly kludge. So back to my original premise - I can't help feeling that annoying me into upgrading in 3-5 years rather than clinging onto it for 15-20, is the entire point. The primary reason I want to upgrade today is to go from 720p to 4k. In 17 years I'll be touching 60, and probably won't be very fussed about 8k. If I could buy a current version of my venerable old plasma today, it'd likely be the last TV I buy. And that's not what they want. They've seen the lifecycle on phones and they want in. (rant aside: when I got my current set, I naively thought CableCard was going to evolve into pluggable smarts. So you could buy a brain from your cable company, or apple, or msn, or tivo, and slot it into your TV. And when Real10 needed more grunt than your card had, you'd get a new card. Instead we ended up with disposable TVs.)