When I turn the PS5 off before the TV, the TV forgets the input ever existed. So it goes back to the TV's default channel - which oh, is GB News (the Fox News of the UK).
So every time I play I have to watch a bit of bilious TV while I scroll through the input list.
Truly a cursed device.
I was sick of getting Fear TV or some garbage poorly streamed to me when all I care about is Apple TV, Roku, or Art mode on my Frame TV.
It is terrible ux. After the samsung galaxy s i swore off samsung, but somehow got tricked by the looks of a frame.
Never again. And the tv can be thrown out of the window, but my better half still likes tv.
I’ve used this TV and remote a lot. It’s not going to be particularly hard to learn that action.
https://www.postium.com/8k-series
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1768977-REG/postium_k...
E.g. 4k 55" for $599: https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U557CV-UMRB-55-4K-UHD-T...
I've also seen Supersonic and Caixun mentioned in these discussions.
Can also be worth looking at "outdoor TVs" like Sunbrite.
1. Is this still true that TVs are considerably cheaper than monitors?
2. Is there a difference, or one I should care about between the two?
There are differences.
Just to name a few:
Monitors have better colour accuracy, higher refresh rates, have features like Gsync/freesync, way faster response times, more and better ports like displayport 2.1 and usb c, lower input lag.
Like, I don't want to plug a chromecast into my "old" tv to "upgrade" it and having to live with a second remote control and more batteries, plugging another device to the electricity outlet and being able to use it only with wifi while the ethernet port of the TV is now rendered useless - I'd really like to be able to upgrade its internals without having to go broke while buying a new one.
They do this so a manufacturer can use the same parts among different products or simply install an upgraded one to unlock more features.
If it were standardized, this would be fairly easy given that they all pretty much work the same but then they would have write actually good software and UI for people to elect to use their specific product.
You could have 2 tiers of board: Essentials, which is cheap and only has as much hardware and software as is strictly necessary to produce a pre-smart-TV experience, and Deluxe which would be pricier and built around a recent flagship SoC (e.g. Snapdragon 8 Gen 1/2/3) with an unlocked bootloader and preloaded with Android TV.
> 24V for the display
Cathode Ray Dude has a few episodes about them.
https://youtu.be/q9a3dCd1SQI?t=2006
They're called Open Pluggable Specification Modules.
It doesn't help that TVs have pretty much all plateaued at excellent picture quality. The main perceptible difference is the size. So, when I go to my local department store and see 3 72" TVs, by different vendors, and can't really tell any difference in picture quality, why wouldn't I pick the cheapest?
Price sensitivity - I find it funny that there is seemingly an immense amount of resources going into things that enable tracking for advertising purposes, but consumers as a whole are getting poorer and poorer. At some point it calls into question whether it's really about selling ads.,
I had a recent model Vizio. That was absolutely terrible. Eventually the power supply killed itself and I haven't bothered replacing it. Over a decade ago I was a fan of Vizio, that one purchase forever soured me on the brand. I'll never buy and never recommend them again.
First, most/all new Smart TVs are doing automated content recognition, collecting and sharing details about what you watch with the manufacturer, which they sell and/or use to show you ads. My understanding is that most new Smart TVs are showing you ads regardless. I'm opposed to this on principle.
Second, at least the Smart TVs I've personally used (a couple of Vizio sets, a late-00s FHD Samsung, a mid-10s 4k LG) all have really slow and unpleasant UIs. The Vizio in particular was glacial, and I couldn't understand why the set owner even bought it (they were only streaming through built-in apps). I'm guessing newer and higher-end sets are fast, but I haven't used one myself.
And finally, I don't want an integrated device like this anyway, I would prefer to pair a really nice panel with a separate smart device (roku, apple tv, linux, whatever) so I can upgrade those independently. If I am buying a Smart TV with no intention of using the smarts, I feel like I'm either paying too much, or not getting as nice a panel as I otherwise could.
And there's key combinations on both Apple TV and Roku (rot in hell) that will occasionally trigger the LG WebOS UI to take over requiring fetching the LG remote from the bowels of the console to deactivate it.
God forbid someone slam a door while you're watching TV and it triggers the gyroscopic TV remote to wake up and put a hot pink mouse cursor on screen.
Though I do have a funny interaction with the former kind of "smart features" with my (otherwise wonderful) LG C1 and PS5 where if I start the PS5 first it takes too long to trigger the TV to turn on and gets confused and puts the PS5 back to sleep as soon as the TV wakes up and switches to the input. But honestly I think I get more amusement than frustration watching the two smart devices outsmart each other constantly.
It works fine connected to an AppleTV 4k and and appleTV is the only smart TV software I'll use. It's smooth as butter, has no ads, and integrates with the rest of my devices with minimal setup.
Apple has their dark pattern approach to promote the Apple TV+ service. Netflix refuses to participate in the global search. Apple constantly injecting ads about their content into other content.
The comment is taking a swipe that the disappointment here is the reporter's lack of grasp of why the remote control is designed the way it is when they complain about it. The downvotes are likely that the comment was made in a relatively low effort/attack-ish way rather than discussing why they think that.
I should've offered more explanation in my, regrettably, "snipe-ish" earlier post. It was wrong not to do so.
I was, and still am, frustrated that someone whose bio indicates a decade of consumer tech review experience doesn't understand modern OEM TV remote design isn't about being GOMS-efficient.
Honestly, "TV" remote GOMS usability probably peaked with the TiVO.
Modern OEM remotes attempt to derive slivers of software revenue from these commodity and retail loss-leading hardware products by explicitly injecting less-efficient workflows into common use cases.
This analysis was done (poorly) at the beginning of the article, but the the writer doesn't connect the obvious dots wrt to removal of the "Input" button.
GOMS only applies to skilled users. It does not work for beginners or intermediates for errors may occur which can alter the data. Also the model doesn't apply to learning the system or a user using the system after a longer time of not using it. Another big disadvantage is the lack of account for errors, even skilled users make errors but GOMS does not account for errors. Mental workload is not addressed in the model, making this an unpredictable variable. The same applies to fatigue. GOMS only addresses the usability of a task on a system, it does not address its functionality.
Now pausing and unpausing is done with the general-purpose click-wheel, is up to each app to implement, and is dependent on the UI state.
If a wrong element is focused (which is not hard to do, because the button is a scroll wheel surrounded by directional buttons), you may end up toggling subtitles or some other option when trying to pause or unpause.
It used to be a hardware button that always worked, was trivial to find by feel, easy to activate, and worked instantly.
Now it's "wait, I need to pause! Oops, I moved the scroll wheel button by a notch when pressing it, so it's a mouse cursor now! I fast-forwarded to the second half of the movie and the audio is in French."
Imagine:
* an unpredictably modal interface
* chugging, tasteless animations
* software updates every few weeks
* terrible battery life
* a constant glow out of the corner of your eye
* easily broken
But you can sell ads on it. You know it makes awful sense.
It was nice for things like switching HDMI inputs; you could dynamically update the name and icon, making it more intuitive for someone who had never used the TV before and didn't know what was plugged into which port. You could also adjust settings more easily without everyone have to watch together with you on the big screen as you dug to find the obscure setting to tweak.
But your complaints were equally valid, and were a concern at the time.
I would have liked to see it ship, if just to see if customers liked it. A traditional remote still worked too. But oh well.
I'm sure I'm messing up some of the details, but --
The TV needed to be connected to a network for the app to work. The university required you to register the device's MAC address before it could join the network. The TV had an ethernet port, and its MAC was printed on a sticker on the back of the TV, so I was able to get that going. But it wasn't convenient to keep an ethernet cable routed to the TV (the room was awkward) so my roommate and I wanted to get it on the WiFi.
There was literally no way to open the TV's OSD and view the WiFi MAC address with the Vizio app. You needed a physical remote to access that part of the UI.
IIRC we ended up finding an old WiFi access point and connected the TV to it in order to view its WiFi MAC in the access point's admin UI.
They could have just given us a damn remote in the box! It was infuriating.
https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Harmony-Elite-Remote-Control...
even if it was pricey. (Used to be able to get them refurbed at a decent price...) The touchscreen works really well, you can even use it to control the cursor on a PC. It has the buttons you'd expect on a remote control. It can run your Phillips Hue, CD changer, Blu Ray Player, TV everything. Makes the dominant paradigm of Apple, Netflix, Spotify and all that look like garbage, but I guess a lot of people now don't have anything to control with it anymore.
The configuration of my system got messed up and and I didn't bother to fix it because I thought they'd discontinued it; the latest I've seen is that they quit manufacturing it but they are still keeping the database up so I might trying bringing it up again.
A TV and a receiver? Sure, fine. But also the PlayStation, movie server, regular cable input, Roku and Netflix and the "Smart" features of the TV for some reason. So many redundant boxes and services.
The difference is that is does not come with a remote - instead there is either a phone app which can be used to directly control it or it can work with Alexa/Home Assistant.
I think it's a great way to "smarten" some older "dumb" devices.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/getting-started-with-b...
I had one of these and oddly loved it, a bit of a geek toy.
If there is another person at home I can boot a second Raspberry connected to another cable from the antenna or connect one of those devices to the HDMI input of my TV that sits unused in a corner of my living room. It's not usual to watch something with other people nowadays.
With this arrangement everybody can watch TV anywhere in the house and carry it wherever they go without having to pause the stream.
This is utterly aggravating. That's literally the button I use the most by a factor of 10x. The center button behavior differs between apps and is inconsistent enough to drive me crazy. This just makes me want to live more exclusively inside a single app, and that app is without question going to be Jellyfin. I'm certainly not a normal consumer, but I'm just moving further and further away from what they want.
I got an old TCL(don't get me started) and when the original remote died I got a noname IR thing that is even capable of switching to a custom channel.
At least on my LG C1 my old Logitech Harmony still does a good job.
Note though that the native remote uses Bluetooth or since other radio technology and the Harmony uses infrared.
Play and pause were there in 2016: https://www.lg.com/us/tv-audio-video-accessories/lg-AN-MR600...
There were other weird designs over the years too: https://media.us.lg.com/transform/b10eeb90-5206-4f69-9959-bc...
We might have TVs with remote locator buttons that would make the remote control ping audible via a press of a button on the TV? So much time saved and happiness granted with ancient technology.
But no, AI. Bad product folks who want to experiment and make their mark more than they want to improve the experience.
This one : https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/949603040
White, plastic, 6 buttons (up, down, left, right, select, cancel). That's it. Worked great with Kodi on an Intel MacMini. Could easily do everything I needed to do.
Since then they first ruined it by changing it be a kind of metal that felt like chalk on my hands. It was horrible
https://cdsassets.apple.com/live/7WUAS350/images/apple-tv/ap...
Then they broken it completely by making it larger with a touch surface.
https://cdsassets.apple.com/live/7WUAS350/images/apple-tv/ap...
It was impossible to use because trying to select (clicking the touch surface) would always end up also adding left/right/up/down events so you'd always select something other than what you wanted to select. I have no idea how that POS ever made it out of user testing.
They made it slightly better but still broken by changing it back to a circle.
https://cdsassets.apple.com/live/7WUAS350/images/apple-tv/ap...
But the circle itself is still a touch surface and still always moves your selection as you try to select something. It's atrocious!
In any case, the 6 button remote back from the beginning was the best. I still use Kodi on an AppleTV now, but I use a separate remote and only use 6 buttons.
When something is playing, pressing the cetner button pauses, pressing again unpauses, pressing up/down adjusts the volume. Pressing back exits the movie, holding the center for 2 seconds brings up more detailed controls.
Kodi also has the best queing experience of any app. Pressing right skips forward 10 seconds, again within some threshhold, 30 second, then 1 min, 3 mins, then 10. I can get anywhere in a movie instantly.
Compare this to Netflix, or Apple TV+, or Crunchyroll, or Amazon, etc... They all suck. Generally left/right jumps +10 or +30 period. If you want to get to the end you're forced to hold right, wait for it to go into "fast forward mode", then press right for 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, Then wait forever as it slowly goes through the movie. So bad.
I remember a time long ago, in a galaxy far far away where the user experience mattered more than whatever whims designers had.
My old car, for example, had big buttons that were meant to be usable with gloves. That was a godsend in the Swedish winter. It wasn't very pretty, but the memory of it makes me want to scream every time I have to use a touch interface in a car.
I like their OLED, but mostly I chose LG more because I was voting against the other guys who are worse.
> “For us, our biggest goal is to create enough value that yes, you would be willing to pay for [Gemini],” Google TV VP and GM Shalini Govil-Pai told the publication.
> The executive pointed to future capabilities for the Gemini-driven Google Assistant on TVs, including asking it to “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park but suitable for young children” or to show “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission: Impossible.”
You don't even need LLMs for a recommendation system. Just matrix factorisation is enough for a very good recommendation system. A local transformer model is enough for the Text to Speech part.
Surely is the product (Google Play TV & Movies, Youtube Premium) is selling you video content, recommending content to spend your money on is just marketing not a user facing subscription service.
Imagine Spotify wanting to charge you on top of your subscription to get music recommendations.
EDIT: Maybe LLMs trained on the media itself - cast, crew, physical descriptions of people and places and equipment in various scenes, along with timestamps... - maybe LLMs and other search tech together could do this.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/elon-musk...
> The executive pointed to future capabilities for the Gemini-driven Google Assistant on TVs, including asking it to “suggest a movie like Jurassic Park but suitable for young children” or to show “Bollywood movies that are similar to Mission: Impossible.”
That seems so incredibly useless it reads like parody. No, I will not be willing to pay for Gemini for that.
I can’t imagine ever asking questions like those in my life... and even if one day I were drunk, high, and concussed enough to ask, I wouldn’t need to ask my TV—I could just go to claude.ai on my phone instead because I already pay for it.
A name for that strange time I was in a room of ~15 people chaired by me, who unanimously decided that PHP should be used for the website, made by volunteers. Yet when I asked individuals afterwards, none of them had wanted PHP, and only one or two ever used PHP.
They chose it because they incorrectly thought that's what most people wanted, and they preferred to go along with their perception of group view so readily that nobody revealed their own tech preferences, despite a long discussion.
It wasn't a compromise, because that would start with people knowing each others' preferences, then compromising.
It was more like a bad default based on incorrect beliefs about each other.
The strangest part, for me, was realising that this happened despite meeting for a good hour discussing alternative options, with several professional webdevs in the group. The groupthink effect is powerful!
The effect of the group decision was not what people in the group had hoped for. Instead of producing an attractive common interest, it resulted in few volunteers, because everyone picked a tech choice they were not interested in working with themselves, assuming it would be of more interest to others.
Thomas Schelling: Micromotives and Macrobehavior
https://www.amazon.com/Micromotives-Macrobehavior-Thomas-C-S...
"In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations."
IMO, streaming won in part because once people (i.e. grandma) changed the input to the streaming device, they couldn’t figure out how to get back to the cable box, or at least didn’t want to risk “breaking anything” when trying to do it when their resident tech person wasn’t around.
Getting rid of the input button is either really bad (making this process even more fraught), or is a sign that the whole idea is just going away. Input switching should be incorporated into the home screens instead of being a separate menu/function. Hopefully this is the direction LG is going.
If you don't choose "yes" in time and the toast disappears, the alternative is to navigate a few menu items deep through an ad-filled home screen (maybe 10 clicks worth). It's easier to just physically unplug-replug.
I'd go one step deeper. Where did they learn to say this? I bet they learned to say this from the business.
Because I've asked about input validation on a line of business application and heard something similar to this "given this application is used by internal users only and because these users are trained experts on this subject, we don't need input validation".
You will get shut down really quickly if you ask whether a combination of choosing option A in step 12 and option C in step 37 together makes any sense at that company. Ask me how I know.
Oh yeah, of course the same person asked why we allowed these combinations once the application hit production.
God hope she never gets logged out of her email.
Unless you have a remote with the magical "TV" button and you only have to teach (i.e. grandma) to press that one when the TV channels don't appear.
Not sure if this would work with cable boxes though, as they might get separated from the default TV input (as in, scanned channels) but THIS is something they should make smarter (learning the default input and assigning it to the TV button)
It could be so easy. Just render all the inputs at once, scaled to fit all of them on screen at the same time, and then select the one you want. Could be done intuitively with as few as two buttons. Interleaving samples of the scaled inputs would preclude any dramatic hardware cost.
Maybe someone has done this, but the TVs I've seen have a primitive and hostile scheme that frequently ends in a black screen with some mystifying abbreviated label and no clue where to go next. 100% certain to traumatize grandma.
That is not simple at all. In fact most TV multiplexers don't have the ability to obtain frames of input from more than one source at the same time.
LG IMO is the best (W)OLED TV in the market, but their software as all other TVs' software is crap.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-am-fm-radio-portable-c...
Today, we voluntarily install smart TVs, always-listening assistants, and IoT cameras in our homes. Unlike telescreens, which were limited by human monitoring capacity, modern devices can automatically process, store, and analyze surveillance data at scale [1].
The dystopian technology wasn't just recreated - it was improved upon, then marketed as a convenience.
(See also: Torment Nexus)
[1] At the very least the theoretical capability is already there.
like everything there are of course exceptions, but a normal ass everyday person… i can’t imagine living with this kind of paranoia.
It's not paranoia, it's convenience.
Yeah they just need an an app.....which is connected to the cloud lol
I know hackers already do this but this would be the TV companies doing it without any shame.
I am not your revenue stream.
(However, I also think that such video services, etc should be separately and not a part of the display itself, so that all of these functions can be disabled if you are not using it and not take up any more power, or any conditional branches in the software either.)
I also think to make up a "Movie Decimal" system, like the Dewey Decimal system of classification of books, that can be used for classifying movies and TV shows that you can then easily and quickly enter them on the remote control. When you activate the Movie Decimal mode then it will display what each digit means and you can enter all of them quickly (without having to wait for the next menu), or one at a time in which case the menu will display the subclassifications from that point in case you do not know what the numbers mean, that you can learn.
(Also, I remember operating a Telus set top box once, that the control has a play/pause button, but it was the remote control that kept track of the play/pause state, which meant that sometimes you have to push it twice in order for it to work. It would have been better to put separate buttons for play and for pause.)
If it's anything like the Samsung remotes (to which it bears a passing similarity), the volume toggles are 3-way controls, with up-down-press modalities. Press = mute/unmute.
It's surprising though for sure; there's no real signifier that you can do this.
It has happened to cars (no, I do not want to supply Ford with all my driving data)
It has been a long standing anti-feature of phones
Thank Dog (and of course RMS and Linus) for free operating systems otherwise it would be my computer
Bonus: the projector plays on the wall behind our main gaming desk, while the laptop sits between our gaming monitors. So if the wife is watching a show, she can turn her chair to the projector wall and watch the big screen, while I can fiddle around on my desktop and see the laptop screen version of it, too.
Definitely no comparison to an active display in a well lit room though.
The screen is hidden in the ceiling in the middle of the room. The sofa is at the wall. This makes the living room feel incredibly big. Before the sofa was unwieldy in the center. Highly recommend.
Henry Ford said customer feedback was bad because people actually wanted a transformative product. I feel like the modern version might be that customer feedback is bad because people actually don't want a transformative product, despite surveys all saying "yes" to everything.
There is no moving from horse to car to flying machine, because there's no energy efficient way to do it, and no feasible path to infrastructure to support it.
There is a way to make a better TV.
Henry Ford never said this anyway.[1][2]
1: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37637/did-henry...
The original quote talks about transformative development, not iterative development.
There were mp3 players, tablets and phones prior to Apple. The main innovation they really provided out kf the gate out of all of those 3 was a touch screen input for the phone. The rest were just incremental improvement / polish on existing product design.
Not that that isn't important (as the sales showed), but we should be clear about what was truly new to market and what was just cleaned up.
Ericsson had touch screen phones for many years but they where a single touch, stylus driven UI that was clunky.
I had Nokia phones with web browsing, media and a camera but it was WAP not full web and the UI was so bad.
Listening to media required proprietary headphones and data was extremely expensive.
Jobs changed all of that in one product without adding bloatware.
What do you mean? There were MP3 players before the iPod, Blackberries and PDAs before the iPhone, and tablet computers and lightweight laptops before Apple popularized them, and people did expect the somewhat clunky early versions of these technologies to improve. For instance, there were a lot of jokes and commentary about the rapid evolution of cellphones in the 1995-2005 era as they went from horrible bricks to trendy gadgets with cameras, software, multimedia, and e-mail -- all before the iPhone had even started development. People were not totally blindsided when Apple offered their streamlined version of already-existing ideas.
Jobs should get credit for the leap in quality, functionality, and mass appeal his products represented, but lately I've noticed the history is getting exaggerated to the point where we were all using rotary phones and beige boxes like cavemen before Steve Jobs singlehandedly invented the laptop, tablet, and smartphone. But the truth is far more nuanced than that.
In my opinion, the biggest innovation by Apple with the iPhone was that the touch screen is glass and works with skin instead of with the finger nail / stylus. I understand apple didn't invent this but it made multi touch capacitive touchscreen popular.
They will lose to Apple's 2025 launch of per-room "control panels" with >1M apps, AI, E2EE video conferencing and zero ads.
In a fantasy world, there'd be something like OpenWrt for TV firmware, but I doubt it exists.
I don't want an LLM on my TV.
I would like android, or as close as possible with an ability to manage 3rd party app installation by myself please.
