This would be consistent with it being, like all TVs, terrible, and getting worse, but not quite having reached the incredible heights of awfulness of the average TV.
TVs have become a bit like printers; one starts to suspect that the manufacturers gain some sort of actual benefit from making them ever more annoying.
(Personal conspiracy theory: An evil billionaire left their money to, er, the opposite of a charity, which compensates companies for making products deliberately more irritating.)
TVs are the worst. Everything except OLED sets have been getting cheaper and cheaper and I'm certain these manufacturers aren't achieving this via production line optimizations. It starts with the connection to vacuum up the data, next comes overlay ads, in a few years it'll be subscription plans instead of a sticker price. and the general public will love it.
Given that customer expectations of TVs now include being normalized to TVs getting slower with updates that cannot be avoided without jumping through hoops, sometimes even bricked, and occasionally even showing ads because the company you bought it from decided they needed to extract more wealth from you, that is pretty spot on. But perhaps not how many people think it is.
I mean I don't expect my TV to work like a snappy appliance from the 1990's. I expect my TV these days to be a slow super low cost ARM computer with poorly written buggy software.
But I expect that of my car infotainment, my computer monitor, and a recently purchased signage screen as well. Finding a device (any device) that didn't behave like this would me more shocking. I tend to think that the best thing to do is buy the most popular product, from a known brand. Because at least then there are millions of people having the same experience, increasing the chance of a fix.
We get amazing hardware in many cases these days. The quality of the screens in TV's these days is completely unbelievable. And you can get a decent one for a few hundred. I too wish there was a brand that would spend a little more on better UX (both hardware and software). But the harsh reality is that it doesn't sell. Rumor doesn't spread that BrandX has snappy intuitive menus, fewer bugs or less ads. The commercial says that UsualBrand has new magical colors and ultra high def thingamajigs, and that sells TVs.
I bought my TV in part based on reviews for audio quality. And while that’s certainly part of the equation, this has just been getting worse the last few years.
Dear god yes. Buying a new TV recently was a right pain since basically everybody insist on making them as ugly as possible with the most horrendous shiny plastic they can find.
TVs have become a bit like printers; one starts to suspect that the manufacturers gain some sort of actual benefit from making them ever more annoying.
(Personal conspiracy theory: An evil billionaire left their money to, er, the opposite of a charity, which compensates companies for making products deliberately more irritating.)
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