161–170 of 292 posts
What am I missing here? I mean, why not just not plug an ad box into the internet? Either use cable or a PC and voila, no ads. Or are they somehow tying basic functions like displaying images sent to the port with ads?
You can still do that. Many do. But the next generation of TVs probably won't even deign to turn on without you giving them Internet access.
Dumb TVs are still a thing https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1629173-REG/nec_e658_...
For anyone looking for a dumb TV, Sceptre does not appear to sell TVs on Amazon anymore, but they do exist as a company, and they still sell TVs (just search for their brand name and you'll find their website). I don't know the backstory.
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I'd much rather my ads be targeted than generic. It increases value on both sides here. Comparing against the baseline of terrestrial broadcast, this is a far better experience than before.
You're making the mistake of assuming the ad is for the best offer you'd be interested in instead of the one that makes the most money from you (i.e. the worst one for you). The expected utility to you is negative.
When I buy an item I'm making a decision that the marginal value of that item to me is worth more than the marginal cost. If the ad is targeted, a transaction is more likely to happen. Transactions happen when both parties derive utility from them.
If you advertise only high profit items without concern for the probability of transaction, your audience will not buy anything or end up buying the same item from somebody else.
If you own a FireTV stick or display you'll notice that the FreeVee streaming app has started to become more and more prominent. It's deceptively simple - they are taking old shows like Murder She Wrote and streaming them non-stop on a "channel" much like the old terrestrial broadcast networks did. They're solving the streaming problem for older customers that don't grok Netflix or Hulu. These shows take pseudo-comme…
>These shows take pseudo-commercial breaks and send you 2-3 ads tailored to you specifically. My wife didn't believe it until I did a simple Amazon search on my phone for automotive batteries. Not more than 30 minutes later the ads switched to some random LiPo battery for RVs. This is so depressing. We're living in the future and it's awful.
Got a lot of ads for the Texas Lottery with Spanish audio.
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Macbook costs like 3x compared to competitors. For example, Apple M1 8 Core score on cpubenchmark is about 14000. If you look for non-Apple laptops with equivalent CPU score, they would cost around $450. And they support Linux. The only good thing in Macbook is display, which covers more than 100% of sRGB color space and has giantic resolution. I wish it could be bought separately and installed into a normal laptop.
Apple Silicon Macbooks also support Linux.
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> same old story from Apple: expensive but it consistently just works. Not to mention at least you know where they're hitting you - up front, on the hardware. It's like the people that complain about a Macbook being 20% more (or whatever), buying a PC-something, and then coming back complaining that Windows is loaded with ads or Linux has all kinds of issues on it. I'm with you - I went from being a die-hard Linux de…
Macbook costs like 3x compared to competitors. For example, Apple M1 8 Core score on cpubenchmark is about 14000. If you look for non-Apple laptops with equivalent CPU score, they would cost around $450. And they support Linux. The only good thing in Macbook is display, which covers more than 100% of sRGB color space and has giantic resolution. I wish it could be bought separately and installed into a normal laptop.
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Fair criticism but to clarify: The default is that if you press home on the controller, it loads up the AppleTV app, where it will show ads for AppleTV content. Pressing home again goes to the actual home, where you select the app you want to watch (YouTube, Netflix, etc.). There are no ads there.
The AppleTV app will show Apple TV+ content by default, but once you've logged into other streaming services it will show a variety of content based on things you've watched across all your streaming apps. I suppose showing Apple TV+ content at all is technically "showing ads," but it's about as innocuous as one could imagine.
I’m not getting ads from the lowest rung trash TV someone is pushing, random consumer electronics, things I’ve googled, etc.
As far as I can tell it’s basically the best experience on a modern smart TV without going full HTPC custom.
(LG was pretty good they’re getting worse with promoting things to you, it seems)
My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
Does it run Android? If so, you can try replacing the launcher with a user-friendly one.
The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.
AppleTv is amazing, and I use it for everything but YouTube. For YouTube, I use a Fire stick with SmartTubeNext
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You'll notice I did not mention what we do with it when done with it. Point of fact, we use the (many, free) electronics recycling programs available to us in our area. Thanks for making dumb and uncharitable assumptions.
Less than 1/5th of e-waste is actually recycled, and most of it ends up in places with little or no environmental regulation or health and safety protections for workers. And that's the stuff that makes it into the e-waste stream. Most of it just gets tossed in the garbage with everything else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVnu0doouJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA