Disappointed with the TVs at CES 2025

Oh, hey, I was working on that back in 2014 for one of the big TV manufacturers. The project was ultimately cancelled.

It was nice for things like switching HDMI inputs; you could dynamically update the name and icon, making it more intuitive for someone who had never used the TV before and didn't know what was plugged into which port. You could also adjust settings more easily without everyone have to watch together with you on the big screen as you dug to find the obscure setting to tweak.

But your complaints were equally valid, and were a concern at the time.

I would have liked to see it ship, if just to see if customers liked it. A traditional remote still worked too. But oh well.

This was one hell of a remote control

https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Harmony-Elite-Remote-Control...

even if it was pricey. (Used to be able to get them refurbed at a decent price...) The touchscreen works really well, you can even use it to control the cursor on a PC. It has the buttons you'd expect on a remote control. It can run your Phillips Hue, CD changer, Blu Ray Player, TV everything. Makes the dominant paradigm of Apple, Netflix, Spotify and all that look like garbage, but I guess a lot of people now don't have anything to control with it anymore.

The configuration of my system got messed up and and I didn't bother to fix it because I thought they'd discontinued it; the latest I've seen is that they quit manufacturing it but they are still keeping the database up so I might trying bringing it up again.

Vizio did this back in the 2018 time frame (ask me how I know). It's a small Android tablet with the Vizio app on it. You can also just download the app onto your phone and use it that way. It was so unpopular that Vizio eventually relented and handed out normal remotes. As far as I know, their modern TVs continue to use a standard remote.

Well, my TV is it's own remote: it's one of my tablets or my phone or my laptop connected to a Raspberry Pi 3B with a TV hat, connected to the antenna on the roof. It runs tvheadend and I run its client on my devices, TVH Client on Android and TVH Player on Linux and Windows. Those devices are smart and can also run Netflix, YouTube etc without the TV spying on me. Each app can do its own spying but at least for YouTube there are alternative players that are more well behaved.

If there is another person at home I can boot a second Raspberry connected to another cable from the antenna or connect one of those devices to the HDMI input of my TV that sits unused in a corner of my living room. It's not usual to watch something with other people nowadays.

With this arrangement everybody can watch TV anywhere in the house and carry it wherever they go without having to pause the stream.

I gotta say: Palm Pilots with IR blaster apps such as OmniRemote check most of these boxes, but we loved them. In 2004.

Phone remotes do indeed exist! Both Roku and Apple TV (and definitely others; that’s just my direct experience) have them. They’re ok, handy when you need it.

So I gotta imagine Samsung/LG will eventually just make apps anyways. Why bother with a touch screen remote that has to be a similar size anyways

https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/remote-controls-rem...

I had one of these and oddly loved it, a bit of a geek toy.

They already have phone apps.

That's essentially what the Philips Pronto remotes were.

how about a smart-remote

its just 1 button and it does what the built in AI predicts you wanna do.

Jellyfin is so bad on my XBOX I'm thinking of going back to Plex. I was really angry when Plex pivoted to a FAST service but after I got sucked into Tubi it didn't seem fair to punish Plex anymore.

> Are there 3rd party remotes for these TVs? Or is the problem that there is not even a general "pause" command now

At least on my LG C1 my old Logitech Harmony still does a good job.

Note though that the native remote uses Bluetooth or since other radio technology and the Harmony uses infrared.

Third party remotes do work on most TVs, I use a Nvidia Shield Remote on my TCL over bluetooth for example. I cannot however turn the TV on using that remote. Having a dedicated Play/Pause Button is still worth it however.

I've got an old one (C7) and you don't have to use the pointer for most things; switching inputs definitely works with just the cursor arrows.

The new remote is abysmal, though. I guess I need to get my hands on a 2024 model before this one blows up, contrary to what I planned originally.

I had an LG TV and it developed a terrible blue tint after 2 years because LG used low quality backlight LEDs. So now I am avoiding LG. It's the only TV I've had in my life that deteriorated. I am still using an 18 year old Sony in another room which is still as good as new.

It looks like there was no pause in 2015: https://www.lg.com/us/tv-audio-video-accessories/lg-AN-MR650...

Play and pause were there in 2016: https://www.lg.com/us/tv-audio-video-accessories/lg-AN-MR600...

There were other weird designs over the years too: https://media.us.lg.com/transform/b10eeb90-5206-4f69-9959-bc...

My 2020 LG CX has a pause button on the remote, but my mum's 2021 C1 doesn't have it anymore. It's a lot worse to use because every time you pick up the remote the cursor appears on the screen and clicking the general purpose wheel will click whatever the cursor is pointing to, so sometimes you need to aim the remote(carefully!) to pause, instead of just having a button for it like on my remote.

My LG remote from maybe 5ish years ago has a pause button

For what it’s worth, the touch surface can be disabled so that the latest remote only accepts physical presses. I discovered this after losing my mind for a month or so, and it’s made a huge difference.

the culture of toxic positivity at work I'm afraid

Nobody ever got fired for b̶u̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ I̶B̶M̶ slapping "AI-powered" on their product description.

AI is too big of a thing to ignore. if you're a CTO/CIO in 2025 and you're not at least looking into it in a cursory manner the rest of the C-levels will assume you're slacking or dumb.

of course it may be dumb to use it, and largely a way to extract value out of corporations for mediocre benefit, but that's still not yet certain at this point.

Group think or not, you gotta at least do something with it. FOMO -- what if you miss that bus?

In order to increase interaction it will always default to playing movies that will cause the most disagreement between people in the room. You will have to pay to create family harmony and keep it from showing your children (or your parents) porn when you're not there.

On some TVs, plugging in a USB stick pops up a notice like "would you like to view the contents?"

If you don't choose "yes" in time and the toast disappears, the alternative is to navigate a few menu items deep through an ad-filled home screen (maybe 10 clicks worth). It's easier to just physically unplug-replug.

Nothing blew my mind like watching my first girlfriend reset her password every single time she wanted to log into anything because she never remembered a single password.

God hope she never gets logged out of her email.

It's been at least 20 years since companies stopped listening to software developers. Now we have product owners, scrum masters, bussiness analysts, delivery managers.

Totally agree. Learning how to explain technology as a teenager to my grandparents and assist them with it in a way they can understand gave me a much more holistic view towards tech. I honestly believe it's helped me quite a bit in my career as a software engineer because I can communicate effectively with my non-technical coworkers and serve as a bridge between them and the devs.

Watching someone (relatively competent in their field) search on Google for "Gmail" then click on the first link to open their inbox a few years ago killed my faith in humanity.

Is that due to software engineers or management/marketing? I doubt that engineers could make such decision

>>Just render all the inputs at once, scaled to fit all of them on screen at the same time

That is not simple at all. In fact most TV multiplexers don't have the ability to obtain frames of input from more than one source at the same time.

I've often wondered whether people would be less confused if they replaced the word "Input" on the remote with the word "Switch".

For people who don't really understand what a set-top box is or how it works or how it is connected, why would we expect "Input" to have any meaning to them at all?

What’s a SAP button?

Funny, I just commented that I like the Roku method. My inputs show up as tiles on the home screen alongside the other apps. You can show/hide the ones you want.

I've had multiple Roku TVs. All the inputs were in the list of apps. You can easily rename them, order them in the grid, change the icon, etc.

Strange, my TCL Roku TV just has them on the Home screen. What type of TV do you have?

LLMs are really bad at this. I tried finding long lost comic book using everything available on the market and got either basic bitch replies listing biggest authors and suggesting its in one of their works or plain hallucinations.

Tangential but I've learned to skip any comment starting with the word "imagine". Ironically they tend to be the least imaginative and insightful and usually only serve to aggravate and polarize.

Because they aren't connected to the "cloud", they are completely isolated. Ever hear of a baby cam, definitely useful!

It's not paranoia, it's convenience.

I don't think people are as price sensitive as is commonly believed. I think consumers broadly don't have reliable signals except for price, so they prioritize what they know. Look at companies where brand is also a reliable indicator of product quality (in popular perception) like Apple or Louis Vuitton. When there's other signals, consumers are frequently willing to prioritize them over price.

TV as a whole seems to be basically deprioritized versus one's smartphone and/or gaming PC. In a year or so when I get my own place, I'm not so sure I'll care about having a TV, at least not right away, and if I do, price will be the main factor.

It doesn't help that TVs have pretty much all plateaued at excellent picture quality. The main perceptible difference is the size. So, when I go to my local department store and see 3 72" TVs, by different vendors, and can't really tell any difference in picture quality, why wouldn't I pick the cheapest?

Price sensitivity - I find it funny that there is seemingly an immense amount of resources going into things that enable tracking for advertising purposes, but consumers as a whole are getting poorer and poorer. At some point it calls into question whether it's really about selling ads.,

I've had excellent experiences with a few different Roku TVs. I think my old dedicated Roku was a tiny bit faster in some menus but in the end it's been the same experience. I do acknowledge the privacy implications of Roku and the fact they inject some ads on the home screen but it's probably been the smoothest streaming platform thing I've used.

I had a recent model Vizio. That was absolutely terrible. Eventually the power supply killed itself and I haven't bothered replacing it. Over a decade ago I was a fan of Vizio, that one purchase forever soured me on the brand. I'll never buy and never recommend them again.

I don't think people are that price sensitive, or big expensive TVs wouldn't exist.

The problem with selling "software isn't annoying!" is that it's very hard to quantify. You can give hard numbers for screen size, resolution, brightness, contrast, etc. It's more difficult for software annoyance, and there isn't really any language to talk about it. And TV makers have no real incentive to highlight how crap their software is.

Last I knew they support firmware update via thumb drive too (mine does) so if there’s some critical fix you need you’re not locked out if you don’t want to hook it up to the internet.

The "Applicable Products" were from 2017/2018, at least for the few i checked. Is this still possible with their new models?

Also, I thought I heard "commercial" TVs are dumb TVs. Although, I haven't heard much about those.

Where is that option for LG TVs? I don't think I've ever seen it, but my LG TV is a few years old now so it might not have it yet.

Awarded you a point for this top tip. Really hate my samsung tv’s software. Because of that I use an apple tv to control it anyways.

Sounds like I'm hunting through menus on the weekend....

I have basically the same setup. I like it, and agree its probably one of the best setups, but to be fair its still a user hostile battle field.

Apple has their dark pattern approach to promote the Apple TV+ service. Netflix refuses to participate in the global search. Apple constantly injecting ads about their content into other content.

No web browser on apple TV.

It’s funny, if you open a TV set it’s already super modular like computers were before we had standardized parts, ports, and form factors. It’s got the power supply which makes the 24V for the display, 12/5/3.3V for the other electronics, an I/O interface board, the MCU and its peripherals, the sound driver, and the IR receiver/Button control.

They do this so a manufacturer can use the same parts among different products or simply install an upgraded one to unlock more features.

If it were standardized, this would be fairly easy given that they all pretty much work the same but then they would have write actually good software and UI for people to elect to use their specific product.

There was (still is?) a standard of pluggable computer interface into commercial displays. Like you'd get a TV with one or more bays where you'd populate with essentially a small computing blade with whatever capabilities you needed. Different inputs, chaining displays together, running signage apps, etc.

Cathode Ray Dude has a few episodes about them.

https://youtu.be/wRPDn5zPF7U

https://youtu.be/q9a3dCd1SQI?t=2006

They're called Open Pluggable Specification Modules.

https://www.touchboards.com/ops-pc-modules/

I think this would be helpful, although it will need to be fully documented, and should also include FOSS (although this is probably less important than having comprehensive documentation about all of the parts, since the software can be written by someone else if the documentation is available).

I use a TV as a monitor. When looking for a monitor at the time I noticed TVs are much cheaper. When I compared the specs, I couldn't find any disernable difference.

1. Is this still true that TVs are considerably cheaper than monitors?

2. Is there a difference, or one I should care about between the two?

Yes. Can I get a 60" monitor for cheap?

For me it's a few things.

First, most/all new Smart TVs are doing automated content recognition, collecting and sharing details about what you watch with the manufacturer, which they sell and/or use to show you ads. My understanding is that most new Smart TVs are showing you ads regardless. I'm opposed to this on principle.

Second, at least the Smart TVs I've personally used (a couple of Vizio sets, a late-00s FHD Samsung, a mid-10s 4k LG) all have really slow and unpleasant UIs. The Vizio in particular was glacial, and I couldn't understand why the set owner even bought it (they were only streaming through built-in apps). I'm guessing newer and higher-end sets are fast, but I haven't used one myself.

And finally, I don't want an integrated device like this anyway, I would prefer to pair a really nice panel with a separate smart device (roku, apple tv, linux, whatever) so I can upgrade those independently. If I am buying a Smart TV with no intention of using the smarts, I feel like I'm either paying too much, or not getting as nice a panel as I otherwise could.

When I think of smart TVs it's less about the kind of quality -of-life improvements you're describing and more about pushing users towards the in-TV apps and software to more effectively capture and sell usage data.

Though I do have a funny interaction with the former kind of "smart features" with my (otherwise wonderful) LG C1 and PS5 where if I start the PS5 first it takes too long to trigger the TV to turn on and gets confused and puts the PS5 back to sleep as soon as the TV wakes up and switches to the input. But honestly I think I get more amusement than frustration watching the two smart devices outsmart each other constantly.

That's CEC working for you, nothing to do with a Smart TV. And you likely avoided the worst attributes by not connecting it to the internet.

My Apple TV always steals the input focus back from the Switch constantly. There is a specific order of turning things on that must be adhered in order to not accidentally disturb the Apple TV and awake it from it's slumber.

And there's key combinations on both Apple TV and Roku (rot in hell) that will occasionally trigger the LG WebOS UI to take over requiring fetching the LG remote from the bowels of the console to deactivate it.

God forbid someone slam a door while you're watching TV and it triggers the gyroscopic TV remote to wake up and put a hot pink mouse cursor on screen.

My 8 year old Samsung Serif TV is running as good as new, it does have Wi-Fi and an app store but I've never had to use it, my Apple TV controls it over HDMI ARC and I never see any interface other than that. No ads, tho I'd be wary of performing a firmware update.

Samsung are some of the worst offenders enshittifying all these products. I would never give them the satisfaction.

You're reading the worst possible interpretation of that quote, and applying it to all situations. Of course it's not valid for some mundane field - Ford delivered a whole new form of movement to the masses. It would be like if mass space-travel suddenly became available and cheap for us all.

The original quote talks about transformative development, not iterative development.

> Nobody said they wanted an iPod or iPhone or iPad or a Macbook Air before

What do you mean? There were MP3 players before the iPod, Blackberries and PDAs before the iPhone, and tablet computers and lightweight laptops before Apple popularized them, and people did expect the somewhat clunky early versions of these technologies to improve. For instance, there were a lot of jokes and commentary about the rapid evolution of cellphones in the 1995-2005 era as they went from horrible bricks to trendy gadgets with cameras, software, multimedia, and e-mail -- all before the iPhone had even started development. People were not totally blindsided when Apple offered their streamlined version of already-existing ideas.

Jobs should get credit for the leap in quality, functionality, and mass appeal his products represented, but lately I've noticed the history is getting exaggerated to the point where we were all using rotary phones and beige boxes like cavemen before Steve Jobs singlehandedly invented the laptop, tablet, and smartphone. But the truth is far more nuanced than that.

Agreed, but the thing they wanted was flashy cool design more than features. Ultimately it was more about hype and being trendy is what he sold - with solid UX being number 2.

There were mp3 players, tablets and phones prior to Apple. The main innovation they really provided out kf the gate out of all of those 3 was a touch screen input for the phone. The rest were just incremental improvement / polish on existing product design.

Not that that isn't important (as the sales showed), but we should be clear about what was truly new to market and what was just cleaned up.

My Samsung does that too. The most enraging thing though is they fucked up standard HDMI. Like, I can't even plug in my laptop or steam deck. It will show up fine for about two seconds, and then the TV cycles it off. It seems to be looking for some kind of two-way communication or signal which it never gets. But plugging a laptop HDMI in has worked on EVERY SINGLE TV I'VE HAD FOR MANY YEARS, maybe decades, yet it doesn't work on my new TV. Aggravating.

It would be better to display the menu immediately and to display according to the physical ports, with a number associated with each one, so that you can push input and then the number and then it switches immediately (even if nothing is connected, e.g. in case you will connect something later). Unfortunately, too many modern computers and other stuff have excessive animations and other stuff, and the numbers on the remote control will not work, because they will not make them to work. (Unfortunately, some TV remote controls (such as the one in the article) do not even have numbers, and even when they do, they often do not work with all of the functions that they should work with.)

You should not have to - but if you're talking about Samsung's shitty home hub streaming service, that can be turned off (I think you disable "Autorun Home Hub" or Smart Hub or...).

I was sick of getting Fear TV or some garbage poorly streamed to me when all I care about is Apple TV, Roku, or Art mode on my Frame TV.

My LG is like that too (well, not quite that bad), but holding down a number key is a shortcut to that input. Huge annoyance mitigator once I learned that.

Worse picture quality but much better immersion. I am also using a video projector and the fact the picture is taking one entire wall makes a difference regardless of the actual resolution.

Picture quality doesn't matter a lot when you are watching a movie from the preHD/4K era anyway. It is even better as you are less subject to aliasing.

I wouldn't trade immersion for resolution. Also one doesn't feel a lack of picture quality when not used to it. I don't own a 4K screen. So I don't miss 4K quality and watch movies with the utmost quality I know. Ignorance can be bliss.

Added bonus is you don't have a huge black rectangle in your living room when it is turned off, only a tiny device (that can easily be hidden).

Having said that I heard there are pretty decent laser 4K video projector these days with HDR support.

I don't find any difference in how much I enjoy a movie/show from the picture quality, down to a certain limit. The projector is above that limit.

Brightness and contrast isn't too bad when you're in a dark nerd cave.

Definitely no comparison to an active display in a well lit room though.

Projector allows you not to have a giant black rectangle in the living room

No you don't.

We switch ours to OTA once a year for the thanksgiving parade, and use AppleTV the rest of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOMS

The comment is taking a swipe that the disappointment here is the reporter's lack of grasp of why the remote control is designed the way it is when they complain about it. The downvotes are likely that the comment was made in a relatively low effort/attack-ish way rather than discussing why they think that.