One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled than the items that haven't.
I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
> One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled than the items that haven't.
> I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
Isn't that Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect), not regulation? As manufactured goods get cheaper, labor gets relatively expensive. The expensive part of patching a hole in a wall is not the materials, it's having a guy come and do that work. There's no opportunity for automation or economies of scale with having a guy come over to your house to deal with your specific situation, but there are tons of those in a factory.
An even cheaper way of covering the hole than a TV is to hang up a rough piece of drywall without competent installation.
Also, I'd be wary of quotes from "someone techy," tech people can be pretty shallow and stupid, and it's pretty obvious that whoever was said that quote was going for shock/cleverness and sacrificed truth and understanding.
It's not obvious from the quote, which just states something that is obviously true, and doesn't attempt to explain it.and it's pretty obvious that whoever was said that quote was going for shock/cleverness and sacrificed truth and understandingBut ... Andreessen has elsewhere claimed it's due to regulation: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/why-ai-wont-cause-unemployment
But ... more recently his firm has explained they know what Baumol's cost disease is: https://a16z.com/why-ac-is-cheap-but-ac-repair-is-a-luxury/
Is Andreessen the source of the OP's quote?
He does have his head up his ass, so I wouldn't be surprised [1]. However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.
[1] FFS, he really implies day care is expensive because regulation is preventing "technology [from] whipping through" the sector like it has in TV manufacturing. I don't want to live in his nightmare fantasy.
But in the spirit of deregulation and techno-utopianism, here's an idea to use technology to slash day care prices that's held back by evil government regulation: lock kids in padded rooms while their parents work. Maybe stick a TV on the wall playing Cocomelon. It requires no labor for supervision, and the kids can't get hurt because the room is padded. That's a "technological innovation" that will "push down prices while increasing quality," for certain definitions of "quality."
Check the first paragraph of the first article. It says 'Source: Marc Andreessen' and links to a YouTube video where they discuss it.However, he doesn't really say anything close enough in either of the articles you linked.I don't know how I missed that. Thanks.
I’d need to see evidence of unreasonable regulatory burden pushing costs up. I take claims like this on a case by case basis because it’s rarely so linear.
Businesses always claim “regulation makes prices higher” but deregulation has not resulted in cheaper goods over time in aggregate. Consumer electronics seem to be a pricing exception and I think it’s largely automation and outsourced production as the regulations haven’t changed substantially in some time.
Yeah, I'm not aware of any regulation preventing new painters/drywallers from entering the market that would drive up costs.
This is a pretty straightforward example of the Baumol effect, where _anything_ bespoke (not manufactured) requiring a human is simply going to cost more. The materials for patching drywall/plaster are tiny, it's the cost of the person that is expensive because overall cost of living is rising. The cost of outsourced labor (which you can leverage when making a TV, but can't for local labor) also probably plays a role.
In fact, I bet you could find someone to fix the drywall/plaster much cheaper than the cost of a TV. You just won't like the quality of the work.
You can also do drywall and plaster yourself. It's not that hard.
No, this is a goods v services thing.
The most critical determinant of the cost of things is "do you absolutely have to do this in a Western country by people who are legally entitled to work there, and even worse, in or near a major city?"
I don't have references, but I suspect that the people working in the TV factory do not find that the TVs are cheaper than finding a local plasterer. The TVs can be easily imported to the West from somewhere cheaper. The labour cannot, and there's an entire regulatory infrastructure dedicated to keeping such labour expensive. So you see price rises in all the labour-intensive non-exportable industries; trades, healthcare, education, law enforcement, hospitality, and so on. While anything that can be put on a boat gets comparably cheaper.
(this is my variant on the Baumol Cost Disease argument, which is in the graph in the article already)
I wonder whether this is true of Tesla factories in the USA? If you have a very badly wrecked Tesla with some valuable salvageable parts, would it be cheaper to buy a new Tesla or to pay someone to replace the 80% of parts that need replacing.but I suspect that the people working in the TV factory do not find that the TVs are cheaper than finding a local plastererI suspect the new one would be cheaper.
Automation and economies of scale matter, not just labour costs.
Marc Andreesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_1cTlLpNMg&t=4262sI did hear an interesting quote from someone techyThank you. I thought it was a VC but couldn't remember who.
> One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled
But what’s cause and what’s effect?
Things that get cheaper over time don’t need price regulation to ensure that people who need them can afford to buy them, for example.
> I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
Quicker, also.
It's definitely cheaper for me to run to home depot and buy plaster and paint then it's to go to Walmart and buy a TV I'd like.
Although in reality, I'd just go in my basement and get the leftover supplies ...
Alternatively, I could just buy a blank electrical cover (or a picture) and put it on the wall.
"One point is that the things that have increased in cost are more heavily regulated/government controlled than the items that haven't."
This is one of the central theories behind Kartik Gada's ATOM concept. He may come across as a bit of crank to some, but he has some interesting ideas.
Now let's compare reliability/longevity of things that are more regulated than not.
I don't care how cheap TVs are if I have to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years.
> I have to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years
Is that a problem? I've probably purchased 7 TVs over the decades and only had one fail (replaced under warranty).
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Most smart TVs have advertisements and spyware that yields additional profits. Same with some electronic devices: Apple devices and Windows laptops sold directly by Microsoft have less advertising and spyware, but at a higher price.
Years ago I got so fed up with the smart TV experience that I bought a $200 dumb TV at Walmart, only had one HDMI input and terminals for a local antenna - hooked an Apple TV into it and had such a good experience.
It is easy to lose sight of how much money is made by collecting data on people and advertising.
Computer monitors have been getting a lot better while being cheaper, with no ads or services. You can get a high resresh rate 4K ips for about $200 nowadays. Display tech is just advancing faster than other tech at the moment
Huh, interesting. My experience has always been that computer monitors have been more expensive than TVs, even when panels are ostensibly the same. I've attributed it to comparative volume in TV consumers and desktop computer consumers.
At this point (as opposed to a decade ago) there's arguably no difference between a TV and a monitor anymore outside of packaging and the bundling of a remote and input defaults.
How does this work with respect to using a remote? I know something like a Roku remote would work display-wise, but you usually program it to use the signal that the your brand of TV responds to. That way you can use the Roku/whatever remote to turn on the actual TV and control audio. Speaking of, how does audio work for this set up?
HDMI standards allow plugged in devices to control the power state of the TV. e.g. my Apple TV will turn the TV on when I press a button on the aTV remote and will turn the TV off when I turn the Apple TV off.
Audio is a separate challenge, I'm not sure what you'd do there. Do computer monitors have eARC outputs? None of the ones I have do. Again if you had an Apple TV you could pair it with a HomePod (or pair of them) to avoid the issue but that's a niche solution.
Samsung already makes a bunch of "smart monitors", putting there the same software they use on TVs. Not sure about other manufacturers, but would be surprised if they don't catch up soon.
Many laptops with Windows preinstalled came with all kind of bloatware to 'enhance' the user with software they 'need'. Desktops too, but with laptops (and smartphones) it is more noticeable due to battery.
The simplest answer is to buy a quality TV and not hook it up to WiFi, and use another smart platform. HDMI CEC works pretty well to discard the garbage TV "smarts" and replace it with something Android-based, Apple TV, or something else HTPC/free open like Jellyfin or Emby.
I have a Sony Bravia with an Android stick and Samsung QLED with an Apple TV. Less ads-ish and spying, but not totally out of the walled gardens. Already have a Plex lifetime and shoved stuff on a RAID10 NAS, so I'm okay with it as-is. I like that remote UPnP-basted casting works, at least with my login. Maybe Jellyfin or Emby have slight advantages in some areas, but it's the devil you know™.
Does Android TV not come with spyware?
Depends what flavor you get. Much like Android itself different manufacturers bundle different crap with their hardware. I used to have an Nvidia Shield and it was a wonderful vanilla implementation. But I've since switched to Apple TV.
> Most smart TVs have advertisements and spyware that yields additional profits.
Something I just realized is TV companies can very accurately put a price point on a specific buyer - household size, TV watch time, content being watched, TV lifetime usage, etc and calculate how much the buyer is worth in their eyes.
profit_tv = sale_cost + lifespan_tv*ad_revenue_per_household - production_cost
> Windows laptops sold directly by Microsoft have less advertising and spyware
Really? It’s a little hard to believe. I’d think the easier thing to do is to put the same adware everywhere instead of segmenting out the MSStore-sold devices. Do you have a citation for this?
Non-MS manufacturers get offers from e.g. McAfee to pre-install a nagware version of their software for a kickback. I have an ASUS ROG laptop, and even if I run a full Windows Reset, I get a prompt to install McAfee during OOBE setup, right after being prompted to subscribe to office/copilot/365/onedrive/game pass/etc.
Manufacturers add ‘apps’ and other spyware. My understanding is Microsoft direct sales don’t have the extra apps, etc. That said, I have not been a Windows user for over 15 years.
Apple devices having advertising and spyware - that’s, you know, not true. You would stretch that tv has it, but that’s part of optional tv app.
I think economies of scale, while only mentioned in the penultimate paragraph in TFA, is an underrated factor. Whenever something looks like alien technology but is available for $200-300, I assume an economy of scale helped.
TFA goes into the industrial engineering efforts associated with LCD manufacturing, but I don't think those wins would have shown up without a huge market for TVs.
Global standardisation surely helped too. In the CRT era, there was a functional difference between NTSC and PAL CRTs.
Not only that, but NTSC and VGA (and higher) CRTs. I had a 1600x1200 CRT on my desk in 1999. HD CRTs existed, but were basically always out of reach for most people. PVMs fo broadcast and medical were different still.
Now LCDs are used at effectively every scale - tiny embedded systems, watches, phones, tablets, laptop displays, monitors, TVs, projectors, and even billboards. CRTs can’t scale like that.
How many CRTs could you put in one standard sized shipping container versus LCD panels?
Saw a box at Costco the other night, looked like it was a queen-sized mattress. I doubt that they're less bulky than CRTs, just shaped different.
The largest CRT had a 43” viewable screen and had a volume of 0.75m³. A 43” LCD TV has a volume around 0.025m³. I’m not saying you could fit 30 packaged LCD TVs in the space of one CRT, but the volume is completely different. If you don’t think LCDs are less bulky, you probably never had a CRT.
Also I wonder if there was some density limit too. Were CRTs more dense and if they were was it enough to be limiting factor in shipping.
But the size of the box is what, again? We're not measuring the volume of the tv, but the volume of the tv's box. I've never seen a tv box less than about 10" deep. Most are more like 14". They're what, even for a 43", nearly 5ft long by 4ft. That's 20 cubic feet, or something like it, for the crappy little smallest tv that they sell at Walmart. That would compare what, to a 13" crt (similar price points and so on). That probably fit in a box that was 8 cubic feet.
None of you are looking at this right. We were talking about how much space to ship one of them. And here you are talking about how thin the tv is when you stare and gawk at it, not the box it came in. Reddit-tier commentary.
Again, I’m going to disagree. Boxes for CRTs were massive. I had to RMA my 19” CRT in college and it was heavy, but worse was how wide and tall the box was. I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I can’t quickly find package dimensions, but did find a YouTube video of a guy packaging a 13” trinitron for sale second had. The volume of the box was approx 0.075m³. The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.
Costco wasn’t selling 24” CRTs, though, they were selling 27” & higher up to projection. These were massive, maybe three to a palette at most. CRTs needed to get deeper as they got larger, so their packaging grew in all three dimensions. LCDs only get bigger in two dimensions.
Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office. It is a production to move it. I could fit at least four of the package boxes for the 27” monitor I just bought for my in laws in footprint of that display.
>I had no car so had to painfully lug it a few blocks to the post office. I'm sure that it was awkward, and it without a doubt was heavy. But heaviness is only one factor in shipping difficulty, the other is volume. For comparable tvs, flatscreens are going to outdo them on that count.
>The retail packaging for a 13” LCD currently available is 0.012m³. I
That's what, to hang on the back of a minivan front seat for the kids to watch? Or a computer monitor? No one is buying televisions like that. Could you even find one retail that small?
>I have a 65” TVs that came in a box approximately 68”x38"x8". That’s rough equivalent to the package volume of a 24” CRT.
And both of those are comparable, are they not? That's about the max (non-gargantuan) television people get, and the 24" crt was pretty close to the max size back in the day.
>Either you never dealt with CRTs, or you’ve forgotten just how massive they were. I still have 25” Trinitron in the corner of my office.
You're being unfair in this comparison. That Trinitron isn't a tv is it, it's a monitor right? The CRT televisions were rarely Trinitrons, even most 25" televisions are half it's size. If you have to stoop to corner cases to win the argument, did you really win?
The 13” Trinitron was a TV. Believe it or not, it’s not easy to find the retail package dimensions for CRTs anymore (maybe Crutchfield pages on the Wayback machine have them).
My 25” Trinitron is a TV. It’s no bigger than any other 25” TV of the time (maybe even a little smaller since it’s a late model) I’m being absolute genuine and trying to be as fair as possible.
I’ve spent a lot of time with TVs and monitors. I kept my CRT monitors for far too long because they had better resolution than any LCD panels well into the 2000s. I still have two CRTs for retro games and AV (the previously mentioned Trinitron and a beloved 12” PVM). I have to move them, find space for them, maintain them.
I’m not trying to win anything, just share my experience. I could easily fit inside of a 19” CRT box (curled up). I could barely cover my legs with a 19” LCD box.
...No, even the CRT TV my parents picked up off the side of the road in about 2001 was something like 30" diagonal.
They got much bigger than that.
> That Trinitron isn't a tv is it,
You're just going to assume that? There were absolutely Trinitron TVs.
If there's anyone being uncharitable here, it's you.
Sure, LCD TVs come in boxes that have padding.
So did CRT TVs.
The padding was probably a lower percentage of the volume, because they were honkin' great cubes to start with, but don't try to pretend that LCDs in boxes come to the same size as (or even remotely comparable to) equivalent-viewing-size CRTs in boxes.
The other thing is that TVs are nearly trapezoidal prisms, but the boxes are nearly cubes. There’s a lot of dead space to fill with some structure, especially if the boxes need to be stackable.
You doubt they are less bulky? A screen the size of something you claim as large as "queen-sized mattress" would dwarf the largest of CRTs. It would also be drastically lighter. I'm guessing the weight of the thing would still be manageable by one person if not for the awkwardness of the size. Modern TVs are damn near weightless when compared to CRTs. Even your "queen-sized mattress" example could fit so many more into a shipping container than you could with CRTs. Even if the CRTs could fit more with respect to volume, their weight would quickly become a limiting factor.
"less bulky". I'm flabbergasted at the implication
They are absolutely, 100% less bulky than CRTs. If you saw a box the size of a queen mattress it was presumable for a massive screen. A CRT that's 100" or whatever would be insanely large and weigh so, so much.
I don’t understand. You doubt that LCDs are less bulky than CRTs? How is that possible?
Because we were talking about how much space they take up in a shipping container, not in your living room. That means comparing the boxes they ship in, not the tv themselves.
CRTs were often deeper than they were wide, they were incredibly bulky in all dimensions.
It's not as if CRTs didn't also have package and padding.
It's the largest reason by a gigantic margin. Economies of scale are exponential in manufacturing. Things get exponentially cheaper as you make more of them.
CRTs got cheap too (relatively speaking), but the scale was smaller back then. The bulkiness and high power requirements of CRTs limited their use to a narrower set of applications, and the overall global economy was smaller. They never saw this scale.
Today the number of TVs plus commercial displays plus phones plus laptops plus gaming consoles plus cars plus consumer appliances with screens is just gigantic, and they all use flat panel displays. While there are different variations on flat panels there are ultimately only a few core technologies and there's a lot of overlap in how the fabrication process works for all of them. They are all delicate sandwiches of micro-electronics and light-modifying layers and various exotic materials that block, reflect, or emit light.
> Things get exponentially cheaper as you make more of them.
not all things.
Things that can scale are things that have a non-linear scaling production output vs input. For the LCDs (and semi-conductors), the area of the output is squared, if you increased the size of the production by a linear amount (let's say, the glass width). But the work required is not quadrupled!
Things that are linear in scaling - e.g., a burger cooked, does not scale the same way (at least, not for a McDonalds burger) - it's a one to-one, even if you tried to make it scale up by having more cooks/more machines etc. Cars, to a similar degree, but the fixed cost of a car factory/assembly line vastly out weight the lack of scaling i suppose, and so cars did get cheaper but not from the scaling manufacturing, but from cheaper components, and more automated steps etc.
Using cost per area metric for LCD panels when we stopped for the most part increasing resolution means you will find that the main driver of lower costs is the cost of glass.
Basically, we have been, since 2018 (I incorrectly wrote 2010 here earlier), only spreading out the same number of pixels on larger areas of glass, so the number of pixel components per unit area has decreased.
I have tried to price out 8K TV/monitors and they are horribly expensive (also not supported on MacOS). Probably both because of the larger number of components and we haven’t yet achieved economies of scale.
>Basically, we have been, since 2010, only spreading out the same number of pixels on larger areas of glass
Only if you ignore that 4k entered and then became common in the consumer space since then, followed by the introduction of 8k.
I’ve not personally tried it, but Apple have an “Use an 8K display with your Mac” support document at https://support.apple.com/en-us/102236.
You are correct! I hadn't checked since I had an M1 MacBook, back then it was 6K (https://juicedsystems.com/en-ca/blogs/news/macbook-m1-and-m2...), but it appears that since the M2 (according to the same website), the upper limit is now 8K.
The article doesn't use that metric though:
> The units are “dollars per area-pixel”: price divided by screen area times the number of pixels
So it seems like it factors in the pixel density too
4K TV’s were not really a thing in 2010
You are correct, I should have said 2018 or there about.
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Who wants to be a co-founder with me on a company that's focused on just making dumb appliances? We can start with TVs - just remove all the smart stuff, make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device, and that's it. Start building trust with consumers and find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed. It's just a boring company forever.
Economy of scale would be against us, but maybe there is a way to surpass it. Fun thought exercise :)
> find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed
I have no idea how to solve this. The pressure to cash out just gets stronger as the business succeeds more. Even starting the "business" as a non-profit is no guarantee, as we've seen with OpenAI!
You could certainly create a pro-user EULA that specifically locks in your company's ideals and forbids reneging on them in the future. This is essentially what the GPL is - it's an end user license agreement that is exceptionally user friendly.
Pro-user EULAs just aren't popular because they limit future monetization paths for the company, but it sounds like that is exactly what you want.
Agreed. This is the hardest problem and I don't know how to solve it either.
Would it be possible to structure the company so that it can never be sold in this fashion?
Maybe something related with prediction markets, like punishing the company heavily if it ever betrays these core values. Just thinking out loud.
Is this idea viable? Who are these smart consumers and do they really exist in everyday life?
Smart consumers of this flavor are a minority but they exist. People who care can already bypass the "smart" features of mainstream TVs, thereby enjoying low prices and negating the privacy risks. Or they can pair a large computer monitor and separate audio system that never had smart features to begin with. To make the business work you need smart consumers who are privacy-conscious and are willing to pay more for it instead of doing a little more work on their own.
I think if you went in a Framework direction (opensource, high quality hardware, techie oriented, etc.) you would be able to make it work for a small high end market, particularly if you aimed it having a great "pc-connected" experience.
It is a bet on two things:
1. the enshitification of smart devices would continue progressing and, at some point, our product would just be better and enough reason to migrate 2. a single, catastrophic privacy event would change the public perception on the importance of privacy and trusting your own devices, which would change the value perception of dumb appliances
Any one of those two would suffice to make the business viable, in my opinion.
> make it compatible with apps for whoever wants them without an additional Apple TV-like device
What do you mean by that? Isn't that the "smart stuff" you want to remove?
Smart stuff should be opt in, not opt out. Some people just don't care and just want to watch YouTube.
Why not keep your Smart TV disconnected from the internet instead?
For how long will this work? Eventually, these companies are just going to insert LTE capabilities and use their own connection for data acquisition.
You could surpass that by just charging more. I would pay more for a high quality dumb set.
Sounds kind of dumb.
The Dumb Company is a great name, to be fair :)
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Something I haven't seen mentioned, the TV's got a lot lighter too. That's purely anecdotal from me having had to move TV's around for the past few decades, and that's not comparing CRT's to LCD's. Even the LCD's have become lighter.
I'm assuming it's a function of building the devices down to a price point. Fewer atoms makes for lower cost.
I look at some large TVs of 2016 vintage being sold for surplus and I was shocked at how heavy they were. I don't have the specific numbers handy, but I recall they were >40 lbs heavier than I expected them to be compared to today's TVs.
Coming from rear-projection TVs as a kid to 75"+ TVs I can pick up with one hand is still super surprising to me
I remember nearly killing myself as a younger man trying to hook up a games console to our powerhouse of a 32" Philips Trinitron, tipping the scales at a svelte 150lbs or so.
There was a 32" flat screen Sony CRT up for surplus on the same site. I really, really wanted it and then I saw it was nearly 300 lbs. I was sad to see it go but I didn't have the manpower to move it!
Definitely noticeable and inversely correlated with the quality of native sound from the average LCD/LED TV nowadays - putting sufficient wattage speakers and optimising for audio with acoustic cavities became an afterthought once soundbars were accepted as a necessity. Cooling systems are also greatly improved.
This also helps with the cost, as shipping costs are partially based on weight.
One place where "TVs" still remain fairly expensive is in large format touch screens. Outside of using IR frames, getting a large (40 inch) touch capacitive display still requires quite a lot of legwork. I've been trying to find them for my DnD map system Table Slayer [0] and I had to contact factories in China directly. It's still many hundreds of dollars per device even for raw hardware.
I suspect the main issue is economies of scale. There is little demand thus there are no multibillion dollar plants optimized for delivering them at scale. (The same reason why 8K TVs are not yet cheap.)
There are so many kiosks out there though. It's more that I think because it's a commercial audience, the pricing hasn't reached down too much.
All that said, it's still odd there's not at least one boutique option for hobbyists.
There used to be tons. Heck there were even options we used to use where you could overlay over your CRT. That market has leveled out to what the market wants at this point.
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Software that uses a camera to detect pointing?
If you're right handed then I assume a USB camera from the back-right can either detect a big colored sylus, or your hand pointing. A hacked wireless mouse/device for buttons?
What about those beam breaker strips you could put on x/y axis, maybe multi-touch/item placement would be problematic.
Yep. That's what IR frames do, and that's exactly the problem. What I've built actually works really well, it's just hard to justify that pricing.
Long ago I did semiconductor work for https://www.flatfrog.com/flatfrog-board , which uses the beam principle combined with in-surface refraction, and I see they're still pretty expensive. You do get an awful lot of little DSPs around the edge for that price, though.
I wonder if you had a big table maybe you could use a camera looking upwards and see the dark spots covering the board that's semi-transparent.
Whenever cheap TVs with spyware come up I always have the same question — how can I detect /learn that the TV includes esim or other means of directly connecting to remote servers?
This is not a rhetorical question — do I read FCC, something else? Use SDR?
>how can I detect /learn that the TV includes esim or other means of directly connecting to remote servers?
I'm not aware of any confirmed instance of this, so for now this is just an urban legend.
Why would a maker of a cheap TV bother with cell connectivity? It doesn't come for free as there would be extra components and an ongoing cell service subscription they'd have to pay for, and that could add up to a big fraction of the total cost at the low end. Plus the vast majority of buyers are going to connect the TV to their network anyway to use streaming apps.
Hardly anything in current TV pricing makes any sense.
763€ for LG OLED42C5, while cheapest current gen iphone is pushing 1k€.
If, as is asserted, telemetry is such a golden ore, getting uninterruped access to it would surely cover the cost, at least in some markets.
Free neighborhood internet sounds great until we consider what could follow.
I guess the fact that Netflix, Disney and others paying smart TV companies to be there have big part of reducing the price. When I think about it, most of the remote controls I saw in recent years have Youtube/Netflix/ buttons on it also
Maybe in some cases, but monitors have also fallen off a cliff when it comes to pricing.
Please just make SmartTVs unattractive and force companies to make dumb TVs again Please just make SmartTVs unattractive and force companies to make dumb TVs again Please just make SmartTVs unattractive and force companies to make dumb TVs again
Just buy "digital signage"
Which works, but is priced very high - and not just for the fact that the seller can't monetize ads. Digital signage displays are designed for much higher duty cycles than a home TV, for display in areas where ambient brightness is much higher on average. You're paying for the tech that you want, but you're also paying for a lot of tech that you don't want or need.
Right, but what everyone is whingeing about is for it to be available even at a higher price point.
Digital signage shows the market is already solving this problem so if all this complaining is to mean anything people are talking about yet another new market that fits in between the smart TV price and the digital signage price
Did they? I can get a 70" "smart"-tv for a few hundred bucks with a crap load of bloatware. But I cannot get the same TV that is "dumb" at anywhere near that price point (I just want a bunch of HDMI ports that I can connect other devices into - including my laptop). Those cost a lot more from what I recall. And part of this was due to TVs being a great port-key to grab your viewing habits etc?
I think it's also understated that competition in the consumer TV market is very strong. South Korean, Chinese and Japanese manufacturers are all fighting each other and it's a market where the average consumer wants the lowest price/size. No one player controls over 30% of the market. [1] Competition is good.
[1]https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
Computer software is on the chart, computer hardware should be as well.
Compare the cost of a new Apple II or Commodore 64 system with a modern Chromebook.
Material goods became cheap since the 2000s because of the low cost production in developing countries like China and India and services became expensive because of local labor. If the goods where produced locally they would be similarly expensive.
Most TV's are full of bloated AndroidTV come pre-installed, and most of the apps preinstalled pays most of the TV
I suppose it would take a seperate article to dig into the financial aspects—advertising and data collection as revenue for the manufacturers.
Yes, I always see TV as an ad/propoganda delivery device, with "sponsered programs" as a bait to get humans in front of it.
The "Idiot Box" box qualification is not without reason.
I think most people don't particularly like TV ads and try to avoid them.
I never connect my TVs to WiFi, and I loathe the day they start slipping cell antennas into these things.
Maybe the unsubsidized cost could be determined by looking at the price difference between a similarly spec'd TV and computer monitor.
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Roku’s average revenue per user is $40+ a year per their financials, so there’s definitely a lot more subsidization of the hardware than most consumers think.
That's fairly interesting, and honestly lower than I would have thought. I really have no idea how long the average consumer holds onto a TV, but if we guess 3-5 years then we're at $120 - $200 subsidy per customer. And this is before you think about the maintenance of their advertising / tracking servers. (although maybe that is factored in?)
Yes, most consumers would buy a $250 TV rather than a seemingly-equivalent $450 TV, but another $200 just to not be tracked and advertised to is really a small lift. Kind of surprising that there aren't options for this in market if the numbers are really that tight. Compare a cheap Windows laptop to a macbook -- yes, they're not really equivalent from a technical standpoint but to a lot of consumers they may effectively be equivalent as the "device my kid needs for school." But the price differences there will be much greater. Perhaps as much as $500 or more.
To do that, they'd have to admit what they're doing out loud, and then they'd have public sentiment against them. It'd ruin what they have.
Instead, they'll wait for the revolt, and then sell the upgrade. Then they look like heroes for doing what people are asking for, instead of villains that cause the situation in the first place. They'll spin it as offering affordable TVs to those can't afford them without the advertisements, and no-ad TVs for those who are willing to pay the extra.
And most people will eat it up.
>I really have no idea how long the average consumer holds onto a TV, but if we guess 3-5 years
3-5 years is smartphone life. New TVs should easily last 10 years. My $600 1080p TV from 2016 is still in the living room. A subsequent $600 4K TV bought in 2020 is also fine. I don’t see what could prompt me to replace them until they break. The quality difference is negligible, especially with the garbage bitrate most streaming services provide.
Agreed, and my TV is much older as well. I was just guessing about average consumers, but maybe you're correct. Maybe people don't cycle out TVs so quickly. I suppose the length of ownership has a strong bearing on cost. Part of the concern here as well is that Roku would be incentivized to err on the side of caution. ie, if not enough people keep their TVs for 10 years, they might need to practically plan for customers to keep their TVs for only 5 years.
Yeah - we barely watch TV in our house (relative to my experience growing up, at least), and we have two: a 50" in our bedroom and a 60" in the living room. They're 12 and 8 years old, respectively.
I'm just now starting to feel like I should consider a new one for the living room, but it's far from the top of my list.
Our TV is c. 2010, and still works fine. And given the current offerings, I have no plans to replace it any time soon.
There are such options. They are wildly expensive because very few people want them.
I think because major manufacturing moved to Asia which drastically cuts labor and production costs. Almost 99% of the tvs are flat and require same uniform manufacturing
Moore's law. TVs went from vacuum tubes to transistors.
CRTs were so incredibly hard to manufacture it kind of blows my mind!
Also they were heavy, fragile and difficult to import. The components were usually shipped to the target countries and assembled there.
We must be around 10-15 generations in to LCD TVs at this point.
a modern lcd is also a wonder but it's infinitely more suited to automation
The top-end TV's are still quite expensive, if you want the best possible picture.
Chart on the site reveals that anything that's propped up by the government/tax payers inevitably exceeds inflation since the government becomes the piggy bank and inefficiency becomes the norm. Government backed student loans and Obamacare subsidies are just examples
Trend was in effect before Obamacare passed so that can’t be it.
The cheap stuff getting cheaper is all made in China so I don’t think socialism is the issue.
TVs did not become cheap at all. The intermediate technology which is LCD, that became cheap. that’s like saying mechanical hard drives became cheap. But who’s buying.
Also article uses 50” as a benchmark. Consumer moves towards larger sizes and OLED.
We may do well to ask the same of what we call phones. Our use of them may be more valuable to others than to ourselves.
Someone actually called me on the voice line yesterday. It was the first time the phone part of the little pocket tracker-computer had operated in ages.
because sociey values TVs more then cars, education, health, etc
Ai spyware.
Now do that with houses.
TV is a mind-control system. Even if they were expensive to make, they would still be given to the proles at minimal cost.
The answer is almost always either "sales trick" or "slave labor".
That doesn't explain a lot, why were those things not used in 2000?
chinese (slave) labor. in fact, look at anything primarily imported from china - very cheap compared to 1990s. look at things that cannot easily be exported from china like housing or education. expensive.
the world has never been cheap, we're just better at arbitrage now.
LOL, the blog gives a lot of detailed reasons, even summarizes it [1] and but some random stranger gives an outdated opinion from the '90s, which is not even wrong just plain humorous. If slave labor, how come everything else is also not so cheap.
[1] Virtually all the major mechanisms that can drive efficiency improvements — improving technology and overlapping S-curves, economies of scale (including geometric scaling effects), eliminating process steps, reducing variability and improving yield, advancing towards continuous process manufacturing — are on display herehuh? it is all cheaper relatively. which exported good from china is more expensive now than the 90s adjusted for inflation?
it's literally what the graphs in the article say... increased efficiency and what I am saying are not in contention.
Why are you putting the onus on the commenter you’re replying to, to show you examples that disprove the point of the article when you’re the one being a contrarian?
TVs are super famous as the economic example of a good getting cheaper in nominal terms every year as they get better specs. Because it’s such a strange phenomenon. You looking for cheaper real goods, opposed to nominal, misses half (or more) of why TVs are so interesting.
Why don’t you show us some other goods that are cheaper in nominal terms compared to the 90s “because China”?
Basically almost anything electronic? Camera’s, microphones, wireless microphones, battery packs, etc.? Plethora of kids toys all made in china. Most of them are crappy throway, so whether they are really cheaper than the quality toys you can play with for longer…
Then, I noticed that some frozen salmon in our supermarket was mega cheap at €9/kg, as opposed to the more standard €14-16/kg, and the country of origin???? China.
I included a link that explains this. Anyone who thinks things becoming cheaper without mentioning china is delusional.
You linked a macroeconomics paper. You’re asking for examples from microeconomics. Are you going to provide your example products or do you get off on disproportionately wasting other peoples’ time?
The article itself already provides them with the TV… you can use cell phones too if you’d like. A palm pilot vs a Xiaomi. Virtually any electronics junk that you’d find on Amazon is cheaper now. What’s the common factor…? China. Again, in the paper.
I would say it the opposite ways, everything has become cheap, but in housing and education, there is now a huge profit lobby.
tfw the price of a thing which is basically illegal to create (housing) goes up
what did the ancient capitalists mean by this?
This is a very Reddit comment. You can move to Oklahoma and get a brand new construction house for under $300k. But you won’t, because you want to live within an hour or so of the same dozen major US cities everyone else wants to live in close proximity to.
The houses as a structure aren’t going up in value (any more than the price of construction materials and labor has). It’s the land that’s appreciating faster than inflation in most cases you’re complaining about.
We do have slave child labor somewhere in the chocolate production chain, yet chocolate is not cheaper every year.
cocoa is the main input for that and is subject to weather and crop failure, which - surprise - is why its' more expensive. however if you're talking about chocolate candies (not raw cocoa) it is indeed less expensive now adjusted for inflation. the problem is the quality of chocolate candies has reduced, so the equivalent chocolate bar is probably more expensive even though the similar one is cheaper.
ironically cocoa is a great example of my point though - it's not imported from china, so there isn't a huge cost reduction.
Aren't their salaries and standard of living up a lot - higher than even places like Mexico? Or are all the videos of modern China on YouTube CGI/AI state propaganda? Also, South Korean TVs are cheap, too. Also slave labor?
I don't know about salaries in Mexico, but ~8 years ago the salaries in coastal cities industries for unqualified workers were above 600€/month if I did the conversion correctly at the time, which is 2 to 10 time higher than agricultural jobs.
That was an issue where I was visiting because basically 90% the non-retired adults were working on the coast, 2 days away, and let children with their grandparents all year round except for their vacations. Apparently that created a kind of 'lord of the fly' situation in some villages, but don't quote me on that, I didn't saw it myself. What I saw was the young there feeling abandoned and let down by the central and provincial government, and their parents.
> South Korean TVs are cheap, too
more expensive than chinese
as for salaries - yes indeed they are up. not every chinese laborer is a slave obviously, but many are - not usually for electronics directly though, more often for the inputs of such (energy and what not).
i'm surprised there's contention about this - it's all over the news.
> more expensive than chinese
How much more expensive? 5%? 50%? 200%?
One example is the Samsung frame vs Hisense canvas. $1500 vs $1000 msrp. You can see similar price differences across all Samsung vs tcl and Hisense.
Are TVs cheap, or does someone else pay the hidden cost?
Food would probably be cheaper, if that was traded as freely as TVs. But since there seem to be good reasons to regulate prices that farmers allow to work, not every domain of production outsources environmental costs to non-citizens or nature in general.
Regulating prices doesn’t do that.
If all we do is regulate prices, then there’s still an incentive to despoil the environment if it lowers your costs.
What you want to do is to mandate prices on externalities – the pollution itself. That way people are still free to buy and sell TVs and to innovate new ways of manufacturing them, but the only way to avoid the cost of externalities is to generate fewer externalities - less pollution per TV – which is what we want.
> Food would probably be cheaper, if that was traded as freely as TVs. But since there seem to be good reasons to regulate prices that farmers allow to work, not every domain of production outsources environmental costs to non-citizens or nature in general.
Resiliency is also often priced out - and food is actually the perfect example for that.
Remember the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? A lot of countries in Africa were pretty darn screwed - domestic industry had gone down the drain following mismanagement (e.g. Simbabwe) and/or Western donations (can't compete with free), so once Western donations dropped down after we reduced overproduction, they went for Ukraine who at the time was famous for its highly productive arable land that could supply wheat at probably the cheapest prices in the world.
But once the Russians invaded and farms had to close up shop (fields were contaminated, transportation infeasible, machinery destroyed, workers killed by acts of war or joining the army), the situation became very dire.
What?
Not sure about the second paragraph, but about first one I kind of agree with "someone else paying the hidden cost". I believe Google, Amazon, Roku, etc. basically pay the ODMs to manufacture the TV for them, and market the devices with affordable prices to acquire more users, in order to gain more usage data from consumers.
Their point most likely is that there's a lot of nasty chemicals and toxic emissions associated with any kind of large scale manufacturing, particularly when semiconductors are involved - the Silicon Valley is by far the US' largest agglomeration of Superfund sites for a reason.
Other countries, particularly China, are known for much laxer standards and even more timid enforcement of these - of course, the generations after ours will have to live with the contamination, but for now, they can produce for far, far lower costs than Western countries with environment and labor protection laws and decent enforcement.
And another thing... advertisers. Good luck finding a non-smart TV these days, you gotta pay a significant premium for what's known as "digital signage" (assuming that you can even get models actually usable). Normal consumer TVs and monitors? They're sold at a loss or near-loss price because the real profit is from the continuous (!) stream of ads over the life time of the device, plus analytics over the content that the users consume.