Dumb TVs vs smart TVs, would you actually pay more for a screen with no OS at all

[Merchant]

There's a small but genuinely growing market for dumb TVs again, just a panel with inputs and nothing else, no built in apps, no ads on the home screen, no telemetry quietly phoning home about what you watch, and I'm curious how many people here would actually pay a premium for that simplicity rather than treating it as a downgrade

The frustrating part of the smart TV market right now is that manufacturers increasingly subsidize the hardware price specifically because they plan to monetize you afterward through ads and data collection, which means the dumb TV alternative often ends up costing more upfront for objectively less functionality on paper

I switched to just plugging a separate streaming box into an otherwise dumb display a while back mainly for control reasons, when the box gets slow or outdated in a couple years I replace a forty dollar stick instead of the entire television, and I'm not stuck with whatever ad platform the TV manufacturer decided to bolt onto the home screen

The counter argument I keep running into from smart TV defenders is that most people genuinely do not want to manage a separate streaming device, they just want to turn the TV on and have Netflix already sitting there, and for a lot of households that convenience clearly outweighs any privacy or long term cost concern

Where this gets genuinely complicated is that actual commercial displays without any smart features baked in exist, but they're marketed at businesses and digital signage rather than home consumers, so cracking that category open to regular buyers who just want a dumb panel usually means paying a real markup for something explicitly built for a completely different market

[EventHorizon27]

Commercial displays are exactly the workaround I use, a proper commercial monitor plus an Apple TV box gives you zero manufacturer ads and full control over what runs on it, the markup is real but so is never seeing a sponsored row on your home screen again

[Ivory Current]

Genuinely don't mind the smart features as long as I can disable the ad rows and skip the setup nagging, my actual complaint isn't smart TVs existing, it's how aggressively some brands push ads even after you've paid full price for the hardware

[Nathan75]

The convenience argument for regular households is completely valid though, my parents would never plug in and manage a separate box, they want power button, remote, Netflix, done, and honestly that's a reasonable thing to want from a TV

[Leo68]

The subsidized hardware point is the one that should get way more attention in this debate, people don't realize they're basically buying an ad delivery device at a discount and calling it a good deal on a TV

[ArcaneNode]

Telemetry is the part that actually bothers me more than the ads, my TV knowing and reporting exactly what I watch feels like a bigger privacy line to cross than a sponsored row I can just scroll past

[Louise82]

Would happily pay a real premium for a proper dumb panel from a major brand rather than being stuck choosing between ad supported smart TVs or a commercial display clearly not designed with a home living room in mind

[CrimsonFury]

Streaming stick plus dumb panel is the smart move long term, my TV panel itself is going on eight years now and still looks great, meanwhile I've replaced the actual streaming box behind it twice as the software side became sluggish