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My tv went out so I had to go get a new one. It cost more to possibly repair the old one than to buy a new one. Aaaahhh our throw away society. The only problem is the tv is smarter than I am. I am far from being electronic illiterate but they sure don’t make it easy. Limited instructions, many references to Emanuals and trying to get other devices from prior tv to mesh with the new tv. That and my wife And I both trying to instruct each other as to how to do what neither one of us has a clue how to do.

Ah fer the 'good' old days when one simply turned a knob or pushed a button to cause things to alter what they were doing.

My biggtest gripe is folks who have zero understanding of human(those who are not contaminated by prior electronic things)factors and seem more motivated by algorythmic(sp?) minimization.

We too have a smart TV. When we bought it I was experiencing medical issues so my wife had the grand kids help set it up. Now, she won't allow me to mess with it. She calls the kids. All because I had difficulty resetting the clock after a power loss. God forbid if I should mess up the preset programs schedule.

With this big push to get everybody to have a smart TV, my Wife and I decided to go out a couple of months ago and search out a non-smart TV so we have a spare and they can't force us to have a smart TV.
Almost nobody had any of the non-smart TVs left, but we did find one we liked and bought it.

I refuse to have a smart TV in the house because there is nothing to stop them from listening to everything you say in your house, and if the model you pick also has a hidden camera, they can watch you too. I just don't need that.

All the smart TVs we looked at have Wifi capability so there is no way to prevent them from connecting to the internet by themselves and spying on you.
Read it and weep.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-warns ... ng-on-you/

What next????

First a remote to change channels and volume.

Then a remote that also does all sorts of other stuff thus creating a remote that has so many buttons that one needs a grand kid to figger out how to do anything.(they do NOT come with a manual describing anything - one must 'learn' by trial and error and memory).

Now a tv with only a remote having a gazillion buttons to control it.



Next a gadget to actually watch it for us?

JPG wrote:What next????

Next a gadget to actually watch it for us?

I corrected it for you.
Next a gadget to actually watch ----- us.

Our TVs are smarter than we are. Living in the boonies, we must rely on our wifi connection for content. Our wifi provider is really poor. And, it's the only one available out here. Consequently, live TV is out of the question.

If you leave the smart TV disconnected from your network, it will remain fairly stupid. Of course, there may still be an Internet connection via a cable box, DVR or gaming console, but it's not the TV itself that's spying on you. I didn't bother setting our TV up for network access, because I can get most of what I want via the cable box rather than the TV's built-in network. There's talk of putting cameras in cable boxes, but I don't think that's happened yet.

You don't have to connect the TV to the network yourself. If the TV has Wifi, it can connect itself to any unsecured network in your area and "phone home" to the manufacturer and anybody else who wants to keep an eye on you.
Numerous manufacturers have already been caught monitoring users.

Gene Howe wrote:Our TVs are smarter than we are. Living in the boonies, we must rely on our wifi connection for content. Our wifi provider is really poor. And, it's the only one available out here. Consequently, live TV is out of the question.

You ain't missing much!