The issue is that it's hard to find any not-too-smart TVs with up to date technology (4k, OLED, HDR etc). Unless you spend a fortune on a luxury brand like Bang and Olufsen.
One alternative is the Gigabyte AORUS FO48U 48" 4K OLED. This essentially an LG OLED, minus the smart TV stuff, plus better inputs. It seems to have a ~15% price premium over the TV.
Hm, don't want to side with with Gigabyte here, but drawing a conclusion from a test of a PSU enduring 120% load for an extended period of time failing would not make me dismiss all their products.
The max brightness on the FO48U is 385 nits, the LG CX 48 has a max brightness of ~740. That'll really impact the sort of high level HDR features you expect at that price point while paying a premium to use the same Apple TV or Shield Pro as your smart portion.
That could be a nice alternative! In that case you do need a separate tuner though and something like a Chromecast if you want to watch Netflix. And you might not have easy access to extended channel offerings such as watching older episodes on demand etc.
I have literally not used a built-in TV tuner at home for 15 years. It used to be a set-top box for cable/satellite providers, now mostly an AppleTV for streaming services (including for public broadcast like the BBC iPlayer). If/when I replace my TV it'll almost certainly be closer to a TV-sized display with decent built-in speakers.
It's easy to imagine a time when the TV includes it's own 5G modem or that Samsung would make a deal with Amazon or Comcast for access to their wifi mesh networks so the TV can get online without user intervention.
Amazon sidewalk [1] has entered the chat. The article focuses on "neighbors" but I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.
> I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.
I highly doubt that. Rolling out this network is a lot of work and I'm nearly 100% certain this is to reduce claims of non-working devices caused by bad WiFi, plus maybe the option to sell network access on a wide range of devices.
Avoiding blocked network for TVs and other "smart" appliances is surely a nice benefit, but I doubt even 1% of people actually block network access (hell, most probably want it!). There's no way Amazon would pour that amount of effort into extracting that minuscule piece of tracking data.
I once moved across the ocean and newly purchased LG TV refused to work because I am now in the wrong region. Off it went to a landfill, this perfect piece of hardware :-(
Or segregate it from the network (e.g. using a VLAN). Some folk might need the freeview/on-demand TV apps (if they're trying to avoid having other smart devices for these things (e.g. fire sticks and Apple TVs et al) and these require at least working outbound internet access.
That's the problem of current consumers. The modern TVs have an equivalent no smart same spec screen but only available to corporate users with all the modern inputs just without the smart. If only we could get access to that market.
The subsidies from advertising don't cause thousands of dollars of difference. It's maybe a few dozen, or few hundred at the most. Facebook's yearly revenue per user is about 33 USD, and they probably have a way better grip on your eyeballs. A TV lives about 5 to 7 years.
The way larger component is due to effects of scale which punishes products that run in small batches, and the effect that the "business" version of something is usually more expensive, but available with higher quality, than the consumer version.
