My TV's getting on a decade old. It's getting bad burn in around the corners. It's time is coming, and I'm prepared to replace it. In an ideal world I'd get a 4K HDR TV with OLED. Is it possible to get a high quality TV that doesn't have smart features? They're completely redundant for me so I'd hope that I could save money that way.
That actually makes perfect sense I suppose and is a bummer because it means the TVs I've been seeing are the price I gotta pay. Hopefully there's an exception somewhere.
These things are fucking expensive.
You could just not connect it to wifi/ethernet/internet.
A TV with 5g would still need you to buy a phone plan and a SIM card so you could just not do that.
Put it in a faraday cage? Jam the signal with microwaves? No idea, lol
From what I know, they're not really doing the 5g stuff yet. Once they do, there's a decent chance you could actually remove the sim card, if you can get to it.
They might just program the shits to shut down without a sim - at which point you'd need some homebrew firmware...
Someone will probably figure it out, maybe. In general though, I think it's wise to hold on to dumb devices as long as possible
Can't wait for tvs to go the John Deere route and just become inoperable if you don't pay a monthly subscription.
Maybe, but that might mean putting it on the panel itself, taking away screen real estate. If you open it up, you'd need to be quite mindful not to short the whole thing
I wonder if you could use a pihole or something similar to disable it sending the data out
As long as they still connect via wifi, that's probably working.
If they ever move to mobile network, that won't work (unless you somehow manage to spoof a 5g antenna, which... is probably possible but also highly illegal I reckon)
Illegal, except for the cops that do this to track protestors by their cell phones, of course.
Look up tvs for campers and RVs. They don't use name brand, they are all knockoffs. And I'm pretty sure they aren't smart tvs. Otherwise, never hook the tv up to the internet, or remove the physical input/antenna off of the board.
I was really just hoping I could cut those features to save money.
Well, they are knockoff tvs and are super cheap. Funniest part is that our 3 year old s*msung just took a shit, but our LB in the other room is still choochin along just fine.
Making a TV a smart TV costs companies next to nothing as its just cheap software. Your best bet is to check out brands like Westinghouse or Element. But I will warn you that you aren't guaranteed to get years and years out of those TVs as the panels often go bad. You've got to remember that you get what you pay for, and for someone like yourself who keeps products as long as possible, you should buy something with good craftsmanship. Just don't buy a Vizio, ive had terrible experiences with those American pieces of crap.
I had to plug an Ethernet cable into my vizio TV and soundbar to stop them from broadcasting an open WiFi network constantly. You may also be able to "skip" accepting the EULA when you first turn the TV on, but I don't trust them to not spy on me.
I put my TV in a separate VLAN on my network to stop it from being able to phone home or talk to the rest of my network. I don't know what kind of router you have, but many can allow you to block certain ports to stop the spying too.
I got a smart TV for free. I connected it to my WiFi, and then blocked it from actually accessing the internet at my router. I've read places (I don't remember where) that some smart devices will connect to any open WiFi to report back home otherwise. This might not be actually true.
