Which is all fine and dandy but if you've bought a fancy new TV with bleeding edge features for use with your next-gen console, like low-latency gaming mode, HDMI 2.1 4K/120Hz, dolby atmos, etc, it can all comes apart when you realize you need a firmware update that fixes a bug with said bleeding edge features, since a lot of consumer HW these days is rushed out the factory door with their firmware partly unfinished and the expectation that a day-one patch will be available once the HW gets to consumers and the manufacturer has had more time for testing.
What then?
Even on TVs from over 10 years ago you could update the FW offline by plugging in a USB drive with the FW binary you would download from the manufacturer's website but now your only option is to keep the TV online and have it pull the updates itself, often unencrypted from some often unsecure CDN server while it sends telemetry data back to the mothership about your usage patterns.
I know I'll have to miss out on the next-gen features for a while but you can count me out from the shit-show that is smart TVs.
It’s useful to a separate SSID for smart-TV like devices. You can randomly update the passwords (to execute the disconnect it step) without annoying everyone else in the house.
well, with the "white-label" TVs mentioned in the article you don't have this problem, because they don't even have these features.
Said that, the advertised brand just looks like the usual bottom of the barrel chinese TV set. And these usually have substantially worse specs than what you get from NEC and Co. for around 25% more than the equivalent TV (viewing angles, coating and brightness come to mind in a conference room application).
I mean.....I have the top of the line LG CX TV and it can be updated from a USB stick. I honestly have no idea why you'd leave it unplugged though, the OS is super fast, starts up instantly and it has all the apps I need, plugging in another device just to watch Netflix seems super wasteful.
Which is all fine and dandy but if you've bought a fancy new TV with bleeding edge features for use with your next-gen console, like low-latency gaming mode, HDMI 2.1 4K/120Hz, dolby atmos, etc, it can all comes apart when you realize you need a firmware update that fixes a bug with said bleeding edge features, since a lot of consumer HW these days is rushed out the factory door with their firmware partly unfinished and the expectation that a day-one patch will be available once the HW gets to consumers and the manufacturer has had more time for testing.
What then?
Even on TVs from over 10 years ago you could update the FW offline by plugging in a USB drive with the FW binary you would download from the manufacturer's website but now your only option is to keep the TV online and have it pull the updates itself, often unencrypted from some often unsecure CDN server while it sends telemetry data back to the mothership about your usage patterns.
I know I'll have to miss out on the next-gen features for a while but you can count me out from the shit-show that is smart TVs.