these days there are a lot of things that have unnecessary smart features
built into them but you'd think the familiar television would be a good
candidate for a smart device with as many streaming services as we used today
it's a good idea to have them all built into your tv right
unfortunately smart tvs are actually about as smart as the common garden slug
with clunky user interfaces poor responsiveness and even instability in
some cases and this isn't restricted to the bargain basement models that you
found at an abandoned kmart my favorite childhood haunt even on some premium
four figure tvs you'll see no shortage of people complaining about the built-in
operating system so why are these nice tvs coming with such slow interfaces to
begin with well it helps to understand the business model of the average tv
manufacturer some of them are companies who primarily manufacture tvs such as
vizio while other companies like samsung might make tons of different products
but their tv division might be left more or less to its own devices these
companies and divisions don't focus very much on either software development or
powerful hardware the same way a phone manufacturer would even though many of
the same video streaming apps we find on smart tvs are also on our phones phone
manufacturers know that their products rely heavily on app driven experiences
and laggy unstable behavior on modern smartphones would quickly put off
consumers tv manufacturers don't have the same set of concerns their primary
objective as it's been for a very long time has been to make a tv with good or
at least acceptable picture quality at a competitive price having a good software
experience is not only something they aren't focused on but it's also
something they haven't had to worry about until recently it was only around
a decade ago that it was very easy to get a dumb tv that had on-screen digital
menus and HDMI ports but lacked any kind of fancier operating system that
supported apps or web connectivity and there are other reasons why tvs were
historically dumb but we'll tell you them right after we thank ifixit for
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techwiki and find your perfect tool kit today now something else to consider is
the fact that the tvs themselves are rather low margin items meaning they
don't typically make a whole lot of profit for the manufacturer especially
at the low end as it's become easier to manufacture tvs over the years there's
lots of supply to go with increased competition driving prices down and the
fact that smart tv manufacturers get revenue from all the ads their sets
contain means prices have dwindled even further to the point that it's not hard
to find smart tvs for below 200 us dollars but why does this necessarily
mean that your tv has to insult you by being so slow and laggy it doesn't care
about your time well a big part of the reason is that smart tvs often use low
end processors as better hardware would cut even further into their already thin
margins besides when customers go into a store or even browse for televisions
online they're mostly still shopping based on size and picture quality
meaning there just isn't very much incentive for manufacturers to improve
the user experience especially when you consider these tvs
all have HDMI ports that mostly allow the user to bypass the smart features
and just plug in their own chromecast or whatever indeed small streaming sticks
or boxes from companies like roku google NVIDIA and apple tend to offer much
better performance since so many streaming devices offer a similar suite
of apps including many apps you can already get built into a smart tv there
is a bigger incentive for them to provide a solid user experience not to
mention these companies focus more on well-designed software and incorporating
hardware that can run it properly to begin with many people have switched to
using external streaming devices for just this reason even though they can
get the same content directly through their smart tv now the situation might
get a little better as time goes on as there's been a trend for tv
manufacturers to replace their own proprietary and
bad operating systems with Android tv or the new google tv which are typically a
lot more stable but again standardization only helps if the
hardware is up to scratch so let's hope that over time it ends up making more
economic sense for tv manufacturers to use better chips
unless you just really love dongles
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