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👴☝️I did that (slrpnk.net)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 58 points 5 months ago (34 children)

How have TVs gotten so cheap. It's gotta be shit.

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  • [–] 44 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    They stopped making them out of gasoline.

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  • [–] 35 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I'm guessing it's all advertising deals and spyware. Oh, and the TV is still shit.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yea, TVs are all “Smart” now. But they don’t have any truly new or useful features, they just record your conversations and transmit occurrences of keywords as “usage and diagnostic” data. I guess now they can use wifi to do occupancy scans of your house too, so that’s fun. Oh and they use Bluetooth to scan for nearby devices that are willing to cooperate in case you don’t put them on the LAN and they transmit that way.

    Anyway, TNG has left Netflix. Can you fucking believe it?

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (14 children)

    Nearly all tvs are smart tvs that make money with showing ads and selling data. Any loss on the hardware is made up on selling customer data and ad space. The tvs would be amazing if they didn't come with smart features.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    Is there any way to lobotomize these smart TVs? Even the specs on a cheaper mid-range would blow my current dinosaur out of the water

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Don't connect them to the internet.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    True, I'll probably end up going that route when this one dies (assuming they don't all require sign in and heartbeats at that point)

    Was hoping for something like a FOSS OS just for the convenience of keeping jellyfin up to date and cleaning up the useless baked in apps.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Never connect them to the internet

    You want your favorite streaming service on there? Get an older (used office) PC, load it up with (your prefered flavor of) Linux, get a bluetooth keyboard mouse combo, hook it up to your HDMI port, and go ham.

    Some TVs even let you turn them on directly to a specific HDMI port for a bonus fun time of never having to see the TVs menu.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Not really, the smarts are integrated into the control circuitry. You can't bypass them and turn them into simple, dumb displays.

    Depending on the model, you can block the TV from the internet and leave it on set to one of the inputs and the smarts bits won't bother you again. Other ones are more intrusive and pushy about it.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    They externalize their true cost to the environment and laborers.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    TVs are made from components that are made through almost entirely automated processes at such large scales that the underlying raw material and cost of shipping become the main driver of cost. Paradoxically, that means that TVs that have gotten thinner and lighter use less material and therefore have a lower floor of how little it can cost.

    Once a production line is set up to make the components, each additional one produced costs very little, so making high volume runs is the key: lots of shared parts between brands and models, very long production runs to minimize the cost of redesign or retooling or downtime.

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  • [+] 8 points 5 months ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    TVs were always cheap compared to cost to make the things - it's not just the "oh, they have advertising now" thing.

    Yes, and the cost of making them keeps dropping. When you were selling TVs in 1991, a 30 inch TV cost about $500 in 1991 dollars. The technology back then just basically made it complex and labor intensive to manufacture, and they were so heavy that it actually took significant number of human labor hours just to get it from factory to store to the specific store's display. Merely putting a 30 inch TV in the window of a store was probably a 2-man lift.

    Whereas today it's a bunch of robots in cleanrooms automating production of high volumes of solid state LCD components to where full color displays can be put in cheap appliances, and finished 30 inch TVs being thin and light enough to be moved with one hand while sipping a coffee with the other.

    I'm not surprised it's much cheaper today, even a tiny fraction of the time period you're talking about, even when back then they were selling at a loss.

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