Children are complaining, but this is exactly right. Yes, I can work around the device connecting me to the internet. What I’d really prefer though is to exchange whatever cost went into the shit add ons, the Bluetooth, the speakers, the wifi, the usb, and put that into a better display. Done. I’m sure there’s a good business reason why this simple, obvious project is not what’s in the market.
I doubt it's actual nothing, rather I think the added cost in absolute value is used to improve operating margins in ratio. This would also drive internal incentives, and it's rendering the cost to the manufacturer irrelevant so long that the capitals at hand and market demand can absorb it.
e.g. $150 TV + $75 chips - $100 rebates = $125 -> negative cost and +10% margin to add chips!
And the problem is that we as customers are still charged the full $225, not the essentially nothing.
I do Bluetooth hardware for my job. At the scale that TV manufacturers operate at, I would be extremely surprised if Bluetooth cost more than a dollar for them to implement.
I operate on the scale of hundreds to thousands of units, and Bluetooth adds less than $5 to each unit. At millions, I assume it's more or less free.
Suppose economics of scale make it cheaper to produce the smart devices than the specwise-equivalent dumb devices, just like how it's cheaper to produce microcontroller-based electronics today than the "simpler" analog electronics which came before. Then what is the argument for the dumb devices?
A smart TV is a dumb TV with an extra processor. No matter how you shake it, the smart features are extra hardware added on to the dumb TV.
And besides, smart TVs are already much cheaper, because the manufacturer is spying on you and selling that data in perpetuity. They're injecting ads into your TV menus and keeping that profit.
Your smart TV is priced so low because it's subsidized by the manufacturer selling your privacy.
What you're talking about was a paradigm shift in the fundamentals of electronics. Silicon wafers in the trillions are cheaper to make than vacuum tubes in the thousands. It was a radical shift in the way the industry worked. It literally revolutionized the entirety of global society.
Meanwhile, Samsung took the guts out of the cheapest android tablet they could find and stuffed it in a TV. It's really not at all comparable.
In fact "dumb" TVs also need control circuitry for tuning, input selection, on-screen display, picture settings, etc., so isn't it possible that it works out to be cheaper to roll that control circuitry right into a more sophisticated microcontroller, which is probably produced in bigger scale due to its wider applications? And then, why produce a proprietary "dumb" firmware for the TV when you can just throw Linux on it?
