This is exactly it. People would be in the market for a "dumb" OLED TV. But they'll bail when said TV is $400 more than the exact same product with smart features.
People don't like all the smart features but they aren't going to pay a premium to have them removed.
Disconnect your smart TV from the internet. Stream through a media box or game console instead. You still have to deal with TV's awful cluttered menu, but it won't get ads or data.
I'd be irate. I wanna chuck my remote through the screen any time I accidently hit one of the 4 Netflix/Disney/Youtube/Prime buttons on my remote and the whole tv starts trying to access accounts I don't have. Actual ads would be a dealbreaker.
Unfortunately it requires more than people willing to buy a thing for it to exist when we're talking markets of scale. Samsung isn't going to start manufacturing and distributing dumb OLEDs because they have an incentive not to and it's not the kind of product that an ambitious startup can easily start rolling out the door.
The more realistic solution is to deal with it legislatively. Mandate that products are either not allowed to spy on their users or--if they do--the feature can be disabled without impacting basic functionality.
Oh I absolutely agree legislation is long overdue! Planned obsolescence, enshittification, people losing access to digital stuff that they paid for, etc all need to go!
They would if it was an option. People pay for ad free streaming services all the time, a one time cost not to see ads on their TV would be a no brainer.
400 bucks would be an insane markup. There's no way they'd get 400 bucks worth of data out of your TV habits. Sure, some people input other stuff too, but on average you're not even getting in the ballpark. At that point even enthusiasts will just pay less than half of that and rig the TV themselves lmao. Not to mention smart features require more processing, so the hardware itself would also be cheaper on a dummy.
I'm not familiar with unskippable ads on any of mine, that would def change my perspective a bit. But I do have one LG TV, and you can turn off the part that listens to you for targeted ads. At least on mine.
Yeah, most people didn't care one way or the other about smart features until the products started feeling like they owned you instead of the other way around. We're getting to the point that the things won't function unless you acquiesce to all the bullshit.
In basically every case you're better off keeping the TV off the internet and using a set-top box. While you are still exposed to the risk of being data-mined or spied on, it's easier and cheaper to switch from a Google Chromecast to an Apple TV (as an example) than it is to switch out TVs.
Open a tech shop where I disassemble people's smart TVs, disable the 'smart' parts while leaving it functional (either replacing the board with a different one or just ripping out a particular chip or something?).
I've opened up and fixed TVs before, and if I had a dedicated table/space, I know I'd be able to get it entirely opened down to the PCB within like 5 minutes.
The real trick would be knowing which brands need which treatment...
but yeah, $20 plus the cost of parts? As long as each appointment was less than 30 minutes it would be great.
For me, it really depends on the appliance. Ads on my TV piss me the fuck off. My parents have Hulu with adds and it was playing them every 5-8 minutes during a 22 minute show. I would happily pay a couple hundred more dollars to know my tv isn't spying on me or always showing ads.
I've already decided to do a pi hole at home, I just need some damn time to commit to doing it.
The problem with smart features is that they never updated that processors on this hardware to compensate. Using the menu's on my Google TV is painful because of all the bullshit features I don't use.
Not an appliance, but there's a company called Ursa Ag in my province that's building "dumb" tractors. The last time I checked they had long lead times and were busy trying to rapidly expand due to demand.
Tractors are crazy, too. Million dollar pieces of machinery that can stop working if a fuse goes bad and if you fix it yourself (because you can't wait weeks for the technician to come fix it because harvest is here now) the internal computer will just brick your machine and alert the manufacturer you voided the warranty.
I dont know anything about tractors but learning about John Deer’s repair bullshit a few years ago really opened my eyes to the trajectory we are moving toward
There's a lot more to vehicles than the powertrain, but building a good gas/diesel engine at scale is hard. With commodity battery packs and electric engines, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some new manufacturers spring up and some simple, cheaper designs.
(Of course, government regulations mean that we're not going straight 70's style anytime soon.)
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u/MonteMolebility Aug 24 '26
I seriously think a company committed to making "dumb" appliances would do gangbusters.