The Internet of Poorly Working Things
&gt; In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all.<p>I refuse to buy a smart TV, and when my TV finally dies, I will probably be forced to buy one, and the first thing I will do is either disable, or just refuse to setup and use, the smart part.<p>I will then plug a Chromecast in. That cost me $35. That actually works with the services I pay for correctly.<p>Even those Android TV-based smart TVs are useless, because Google does not control them and cannot force the OEM to push Android updates.... although, Android TV does let you Chromecast to it, which is probably what I would use it for.<p>Although, if I <i>wanted</i> Android TV, I&#x27;d buy an Nvidia Shield TV and use that instead, since it actually has a reasonable amount of horsepower, supports H265 Main10 and Rec2020 colorspace (in the hardware, AndroidTV support of it itself is upcoming), thus, true 4k support (not merely 2160p support using 8-bit Rec709&#x2F;sRGB, which a lot of so called 4k devices and TVs are; for a historical perspective, see all the TVs that can only do 720p and 1080i but not 1080p, thus are not actually HDTV&#x2F;Bluray compatible at all, this is the same thing al over again).<p>Technology advances too quickly for a TV to ever be smart. I&#x27;d pay <i>more</i> for a dumb TV that has two more HDMI ports instead, ripping out any smart TV SoC, and ripping out the (extremely useless) cable tuner.<p>Side note: the cable tuner is useless on cable, due to all cable companies moving to encrypting all channels, or moving to IPTV platforms entirely, thus always requiring a box (CableCard is a dead standard and was a mistake, similarly to how smart TV is a mistake and should be just as dead); the cable tuner is always useless on satellite; and if you&#x27;re trying to do OTA, many TVs, even ones produced today, do not have sufficient sensitivity to dial into channels for many reasons (distance, obscured line of sight, reflections), and even with large enough antennas, you&#x27;ll get better performance (and sometimes, the ONLY performance) out of a dedicated OTA box.<p>As of which OTA box, if you <i>need</i> signal performance for extreme OTA situations, Channel Master&#x27;s tuners, as a set top box, kind of suck, but often are the only ones that can coherently decode a signal.