"just don't connect it to the internet" is such a typical HN response that completely misses the point. A smart TV with no internet connection is still a smart TV. It still has an entire operating system that needs to load wifi, ethernet, Bluetooth, usb driver stacks. It still has an awful, flashy interface that adds unnecessary steps between changing inputs. It still tries to load god knows what apps every time you…
A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements, and your nonfunctional requirements (low processing power) frankly don't matter to most people. My smart-but-disconnected TV turns on just as quickly as my PC monitors can return from sleep (a second or two); changing inputs is just as quick (input button on remote, left/right to select, okay to confirm), and the automatic input selection when…
Ehhh I beg to differ. I got a Sony TV a year or so ago with Google TV built in. It's been a nightmare - the GUI is basically unusably slow (literally 5 entire seconds from button press to response) and the whole experience sucks.
So I did what most reasonable people did - plug in some HDMI device that doesn't suck (in my case, an Apple TV) - except that didn't fix the problem entirely.
You see, this TV really really really wants to boot into Google TV. So sure, you have your dongle plugged into this HDMI port full time but it just won't reliably boot into it. Even after setting the HDMI port as the default, half the time it insists on booting into Google TV anyway. And sure, I can grab the TV remote and switch inputs - but again, it's multiple button presses on a software suite that takes ~5 seconds to respond to a single button press. It's a good 20-30 seconds just to switch inputs.
It's maddening. So maddening that I am in fact in the market for a dumb TV just so I can be rid of this cursed UX.
I'm not particularly puritanical about this. I'm willing to live with "just disconnect it", but that solution doesn't actually work for me!