I’m considering buying a new TV. There’s plenty of posts about trying to find dumb TVs, comments like ‘just don’t connect it to the internet/network’.
What surprises me is that there isn’t a good overview of (popular) TVs or brands with basic information, answering for each TV:
- Can you use it as a basic TV by choosing not to enable smart features during setup?
- Can you opt out by just not accepting a bunch of agreements?
- Does it have a camera and/or microphone? Where in the device are these? Is there a physical disable switch for microphone?
- Does it nag when not connected to any network?
- Does it have higher than normal power usage when not able to phone home?
- Has it been discovered to connect to public WiFi networks? Does it have the (theoretical) ability to connect to 5G mobile networks?
And similar.
There are extensive lists with a lot of detail about VPN services but nothing like that for TVs. Am I ignorant of a good source, or does this just not exist (yet)?
Get a dumb video projector.
Shockingly, those are also getting rarer.
Indeed. That being said I have a (sigh) Android video projector (Nebula Mars II Pro, by Anker) and even though it does comes with its bloatware (namely “trying” to force installation, without actually doing it, of e.g. YouTube or NetFlix apps) attempts one can ignore that, install F-Droid, install VLC and Launch on Boot from there then boot straight to VLC without have to interact with the stock launcher. Also remote adb works by default so one can tinker quite a bit without even having to active a kind of developer mode.