Edge-lit is first and foremost a cost-cutting design. It allowed the thin-craze to advance significantly but edge-lit is also used where thinness isn't prioritized. Because it is primarily the cheapest design they've been able to come up with.

So I'm not quite sure about the comment that "it is not because the televisions are inexpensive".

The problem seems to be heat, and edge-lit concentrates heat along the (small) light source. Better materials, bigger heatsinks etc. can combat this but since cost was the driving factor that negates the entire existence of the edge-lit display.

And I'm not sure about thin bezels? They are talking about thickness, no?

I have a $4500 LG OLED thin TV that is 2 years old and broken

The screen has had lines for a while, annoying, but not critical. Now there’s a power issue where it powers off in a few minutes

Now, this is out of warranty, and, it turns out, the 2 LG repair locations in the Seattle area no longer do TVs

LG know this is a problem - they are currently sending parts, and there’s a West Coast LG repair guy who will come and fix it when the parts arrive

A 4K $4k TV that isn’t that old and is almost un repairable is crazy

Anything with some exotic screen is going to cost more money and be harder to fix - pay for the extended warranty!

Note - my credit card has automatic extended warranty, but I need a quote for fixing the item, and there are absolutely no authorized repair people within 500 miles of Seattle to even get that!

Adjusted for inflation, I once spent nearly that much on a big (for the time), nice 1080P LCD TV.

I paid extra for an extended warranty.

After a couple of years the power supply started to fail, and the company that sold me the warranty had gone bankrupt.

You're not describing a new problem, I don't think.

(Next, can we talk about the reliability of exotic cars?)

Ha! I paid for one on a pickup truck. When it needed something, I sent in the 12 documents required to make a claim. They returned it, with a letter saying 'you forgot the thirteenth double-secret document we didn't say you needed to send'. I gave up.

I am fairly that all, or at least so many as to destroy trust, extended warranties are scams.

I bought the last dumb Vizio 55" TV over a decade ago at Walmart for around $600 and the dang thing won't die.

I want a bigger TV but I can't justify throwing this perfectly functioning television out.

Sucks to be me.

I've got a dumb Insignia TV that I think is getting ready to celebrate it's sweet 16! It's old, its heavy (I had to buy the TV mount that is typically for much larger TV's) but it survives and because its big they actually put larger audio drivers in there and it sounds fine without a sound bar.

Meanwhile another Insignia TV I bought more recently started getting dead pixels a couple days after the warranty expired...

Idea: keep a croquet ball by your chair. When some favorite athlete performs badly at some Olympic event, throw the croquet ball at the screen!

Voila, you need a new TV.

There's no hiding the need for companies to condition consumers to understand that purchasing a top-shelf item is not supposed to be about investing in long-lasting quality any more. That's so 20th century.

To consume as directed you need to enjoy the most luxurious product you can get for your top-dollar, if you can afford it, with confidence that the features are at least on par with the modern bargain alternatives. That's a fairly definite bar when it comes to disposability/non-repairability, but engineering-to-specifications can adapt by being informed from experience with lesser models.

Don't worry, they really are intended to last as long as the cheapest crummiest models on the average.

"authorized repair people"

What is shit concept. As tech becomes more varied repairs will become more of a project instead of a process. I mean repairs will be more expensive and less likely to succeed (I think this will be offset by decreasing prices and wider parts availability).

Think about how many fields are already screwed over to the point of demanding legal protections for repairing their own stuff. Somehow Nebraska farmers and New York smartphone repair companies teamed up to push right to repair.

Somehow we need to bake this decentralized model of repair into our culture. If you can find "authorized repair people" in Seattle, then I certainly won't find them in Omaha. If parts are available I would certainly try repairs on my own. I recently fixed a kindle, and replaced a few phone screens, I built a 3d printer from parts, maybe I could fix a TV if the manufacturer doesn't actively stand in the way.

"And if televisions break every three years, that’s good for business I guess?"

Only if consumers have a preference for TVs with short lifespans, which they don't.

Of course not, but I don't believe most people I am friends with (or family) spend time really looking into products before they buy. Maybe a car or something? But a TV? When you can get them for $200-$300 at Walmart? Unlikely, unfortunately. So, that business model still works.

I realize my very small social bubble is not remotely large enough for an actual population sample, but I feel like it's just common sense. Things like Temu exist because this is a very common way of thinking.

Pretty much everybody replacing a TV that only lasted three years will choose a different brand next time. Making things that don't last is a good way to destroy the value of a brand

Sure, but it is easy to make the, lasts 3 years tv with a thousand different brands thus ensuring they can are repeat customers.

From an executives perspective is they don't destroy the brand for short term gains, the next guy probably will. So why shouldn't they be the one to benefit?

Unless the new one is cheaper and bigger. It's a TV, not a dishwasher.

But you just get the equally cheap & bigger TV from a different brand.

All you need to do is look at Samsungs abysmal reputation for refrigerators to see my point in action.

But they do have a preference for cheap things, and don't think about the lifespan

The environmental impact of producing a product that needs frequent replacement should not be ignored. Especially when it's proven to be avoidable.

There is an easy, proven way to make it count: include it into the price.

You would be shocked to know that the environmental impact per TV has also dropped. Significantly. There was a lot that went into early televisions.

> They are also absurdly cheaper than they have ever been.

Are they cheaper or just larger?

They are absolutely cheaper. You can get a pretty decent 48 inch TV for ~$200.

For that price you could also get a CRT TV.

The point was: they are cheaper per size. You can either get LCD TVs at the price of a CRT that are much larger than a CRT of the same price, or a LCD TV at the size of a CRT which is much cheaper than the same-sized CRT.

Are there really TVs which are "much cheaper" than $200 CRT-TVs?

Well there are 24 inch TVs for around $100, so I would say yes

No. The requirement of having a massive vacuum tube has already put you over a modern LCD when you look at cost of goods, shipping (bigger boxes), stocking, etc. There's no way. If you bend and twist and spindle the definition of "CRT" until you've got something that can compete just to win the argument you'll find that you've created something that no normal person would recognize as a "CRT".

Technology is not a magic force that just ambiently shrinks everything. The resulting products have to correspond to real configuration of atoms that can be really manufactured and really sold in the real world. The base specifications for what you need to A: have a vacuum chamber that B: doesn't mind being constantly bombarded by electrons and the resulting radiation for decades at a time is not something that is going to magically get to a one-inch depth for a 60-inch TV.

There's no world in which Walmart is selling cheap 70" CRTs.

I want to see the math for creating an electron gun that can blast phospors on a screen a foot away that is 70 inches wide and flat. That big space in most CRTs let the math be simple for how the electron gun emitted electrons. If the gun had a narrow angle to the screen (small screens or deeper backing), then the screen could be slightly curved and t just needed to be a grid coming out of the gun. To visualize this on imagine if you following the curve of CRT screens up and down then left and right, eventually it would make a sphere around the electron gun.

But towards the end of CRTs there were flat screens, not thin CRTs, but things that were clearly a CRT but with a non-curved screen. To make this happen the electron gun needed to perform a distortion on the scan lines that would account for this.

In theory the gun could be moved closer and closer to the screen and the math adjusted to be correct at any distance. But the further towards the edge of the screen a pixel was the more precise the gun would need to be to hit the right spot and the fewed trick filters and gratings on the screen itself could do. Clearly 70 inches inches practical for an in home CRT, but I think it is fun to think about.

You can get a 70 inch TV for $400 at Walmart today. My last CRT was a 27" and I payed $1,000. They are absolutely cheaper.

Edit: To be clear, I'm agreeing with parent post here. It is mind blowing how cheap televisions have become.

Weren't the largest wide scale retail CRTs around 36~40 inches?

Actually, the thins screens are higher cost because they are more expensive to make. So it’s not the case that cheaper ones break sooner.

They are higher cost than what? My point was that televisions, as a category, have absolutely plummeted in costs. It is laughable how much they have fallen. When we moved into our first house, we kept a few nice CRTs because we thought they would make good extras for the house. By the time we admitted that they were silly, a replacement panel was barely $100 and nobody was accepting the CRT for resale.

I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels. And what the environmental impact of producing them is. I would not be at all shocked to know that the effort that goes into making them lowers both of those metrics. I would be shocked if it is dramatic.

> I would be interested in knowing how much harder it is to recycle these new panels.

I actually had a hard time finding a place to actually take my last LCD TV for recycling. It was 55", but the local recycler only took LCDs up to 50" in size. They suggested going to Best Buy or other places as they took TVs up to I think 70" or something. But the people at the Best Buy nearby didn't understand me wanting to recycle the TV, they kept asking why I didn't just throw it in the trash. They ultimately wanted to charge me something like $40 to take the TV for recycling.

This is the exact run-around we got for our 27" CRT. I think they were charging more to take it for recycling, oddly. Flat didn't accept it for landfill.