> “Any TV worth buying is very likely going to ask to connect to your Wi-Fi, and that’s been the case for many years now,” he says. “If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
TLDR: "Even though you're asking for a not-smart TV, we're denying the premise of your question: you don't actually want one after all. Here are a few smart TVs you might like."
I have a 60" Sceptre dumb TV, it's the exact one that comes up in every single thread on this topic. It's 4K, it cost about $400-$450 whenever I bought it — 3 or 4 years ago — and it is great. It cannot connect to the internet, it doesn't know what a Netflix is, and it has all the ports I need.
> it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want
I disagree with you; the answer they give is pretty reasonable. Sceptre TVs are recommended everywhere you look if you search for dumb TVs, they're not hard to find. But people looking for a brand new TV often want common modern TV features, like HDR. Heck, I'm holding on to an old plasma set until I can get a decent OLED at a reasonable price. Hopefully where "smart" features are either absent or enthusiasts have worked out how to eliminate any privacy hazards.
A $400 Sceptre is very much not what I am interested in. But I am interested in a dumb, privacy-friendly screen! It's not "denying the premise" of wanting a dumb TV to point out these limitations, as well as offer what is the most practical alternative for most people - just don't connect it to WiFi.
> It's not "denying the premise" of wanting a dumb TV to point out these limitations, as well as offer what is the most practical alternative for most people - just don't connect it to WiFi.
They denied the premise of the question. The question was "Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me?" and the answer wasn't just "no, there are none I can or will recommend", which would be one thing. Instead the answer was "I'm not going to answer that question, because you don't actually want the thing you said you want". Since some people want dumb TVs, and they do exist, it would have been possible for the author to recommend the best example of that product, whatever they felt about it personally, or whatever assumptions they had about what the questioner actually wanted.
> "because you don't actually want the thing you said you want"
I guess I didn't feel, reading the article, that they were saying that. They never said that you don't really want a dumb TV, they said that none of them are good purchases because the vast majority of people are looking for features that the dumb TVs don't have. From the article:
> If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it
It's not that it's a mistake to look for a dumb TV, it's that that none of them are (in the opinion of the author) good buys. So it's not so much denying the question as it is making the assumption that the question-asker is probably looking for more than just the one "feature" of "dumbness".
There's some inherent reviewer bias to these things. They have a financial motive to pretend all these features matter, because what else are they going to write about most of the time?
TLDR: "Even though you're asking for a not-smart TV, we're denying the premise of your question: you don't actually want one after all. Here are a few smart TVs you might like."
I have a 60" Sceptre dumb TV, it's the exact one that comes up in every single thread on this topic. It's 4K, it cost about $400-$450 whenever I bought it — 3 or 4 years ago — and it is great. It cannot connect to the internet, it doesn't know what a Netflix is, and it has all the ports I need.