An honest letter to Smart TV manufacturers.

DI am the (not so) proud owner of a smart TV. Specifically, a TCL 43 inch Google TV I think Series 4? Anyway, about a year ago I needed a reasonably priced smart TV for my apartment. I specifically wanted to go with Google TV so it’d have integration with the rest of my Google Home.

Now, for the first six months of this TVs life, it was fine I guess? Not the fastest thing in the world, but not sluggish either. It worked. It did the job. (except for F1 TV…the app wasn’t available and even the sideloaded version lagged hard on it so I had to hook up my laptop anyway).

But a year has passed and I feel like I’m at the point that every smart TV hits. It’s so damn slow. Trying to turn the thing on already takes a minute. Opening an app like Netflix or YouTube TV, you might as well make that microwave dinner because it’ll be done by the time your show is on.

All because Smart TV manufacturers skimp on the part that matters - the SoC (and software updates too)

See, for the longest time ever I have always thought the Apple TV is actually the best streaming box on the market. Not because it has the best features or apps, but simply because it’s actually fast and a pleasure to use. It does not take 5 light years to launch Netflix, it instead takes 5 seconds (or less). Which is about how long I’d like to wait to open Netflix. Crazy, right?

Unfortunately, literally every smart TV manufacturer puts the lowest-cost SoC in their TV and it becomes obsolete within a year. As far as I can recall my TV is graced with 4 state-of-the-art ARM Cortex A53 cores running at 1.5 GHz, a whopping 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage (wow!), and 100 Mbps Ethernet (the future is here!).

So you’re telling me my smart TV has the power of a smartphone from like…5 years ago? And it’s gonna drive a 4K HDR10 60fps display? Spoiler alert, it doesn’t. It’s no wonder that smart TVs become so slow and sluggish so fast when they barely have any processing power to begin with. It doesn’t matter if you have an LG smart TV, Android TV, Fire TV, they’re all slow. Roku TVs honestly are bearable but only because their software is quite simple and their stack is optimized for these lower-powered TVs.

It only gets worse with software updates. Think about a Smart TV made about 5-6 years ago. Is it still usable right now? No, because that TV got abandoned with software updates long ago, the manufacturer dropped support for the platform, now apps aren’t getting updated, and you’d be hooking up a laptop to it anyway to watch something (or bought a streaming box). Smart TVs are quite literally e-waste from the minute you buy it.

Therefore, I plead with smart TV manufacturers to do one of two things.

One option is to spend dare I say maybe an extra 20-30 bucks on a slightly better SoC for your TV and guaranteeing some longevity. Maybe give it some processing power so that the TV can run at more than 2 FPS around the UI. Maybe make it so it takes less than a human lifetime to launch an app. The Apple TV and NVIDIA Shield are perfect examples of streaming boxes with lots of horsepower to show for it - they’re some of the smoothest experiences on the market. And these boxes last longer too! The original Apple TV 4K from 2017 is still receiving updates to this day because of the extra processor headroom. I wouldn’t mind paying extra for the piece of mind that my smart TV will still be operational 5 years down the road from now.

The other option (and I think this is the better one) is to just simply…make dumb TVs again. Drop the cost by $50 or so compared to a smart TV (since now you don’t need the smart TV stuff) and pass along those savings to the consumer who can then pick up a streaming box of their choosing. No more e-waste off the shelf - I just have to upgrade the streaming box when needed. At home we had a Sony 1080p TV for almost a decade before we upgraded to a 4K TV. TV technology doesn’t change that fast, and dumb TVs are better for everyone’s wallet (except the corporations which is good! very good in fact!)

For me, I do enjoy the one smart of being able to yell at my nest hub in the bedroom if I forgot to leave the TV on. Otherwise, I’ve hooked up my gaming PC from 7 years ago (i5 6500 and GTX 1060) and that now handles all video/audio for the TV. The media PC takes about 60 seconds to go from off to watching something (at the expense of having to use a keyboard and mouse), but that’s about one human lifetime less than attempting to watch something on the TV itself and a small sacrifice to pay. In the future I might buy a used Apple TV on eBay. People sell the 4K 2nd Gen for around 80 bucks so it’s a good deal if you can pick one up.

Anyway, that’s all for this rant. I hope that one day we will see a future when smart TVs don’t warp the spacetime continuum with their abysmal loading times and can last maybe more than a year.