On fire, fire sale, what's the difference?

At Radio Shack, you've got Questions, We've got cellphones.

Agreed. They did a lot better with retired engineers and college kids majoring in EE.

Cats will do that:-)

I can see why consumers might generally prefer an all-in-one solution *IF* it won't be enshitified. Alas, since it WILL be, I prefer a device that can't phone home at all in order to make enshittification impossible. It's unfortunate that the otherwise cleaner solution is screwed up by bad manufacturers.

Google would think twice about telling people to drink bleach if they could be sued by family members of dead bleach drinkers.

If the TV was appropriately cheaper for not having the smarts, the $30 might not seem like much. It's not exactly complicated to plug the chromecast into an HDMI input. The chromecast remote will be what you need most of the time since the chromecast itself can turn the TV on, select the correct input, etc and the remote also has an IR transmitter to handle the volume function.

Admittedly, assembling the Pi is a step up in knowledge many wouldn't manage.

Many people do manage to use a chromecast just fine.

It would be better to somehow ban enshittification, but even defining it legally would be a hard problem, much less getting the legislation past the gauntlet of industry lobbyists.

Sooner or later, we'll run out of consultants. People eventually retire or quit the industry in disgust and the new crop of vibe coders certainly aren't going to fill those roles.

That matches my (limited) experience. Just for giggles, I let copilot (on Github) have a crack at a function in some of my code. Its suggested improvement made some sense in a vacuum, but in context it read more like someone who feels they must 'contribute' something and that's all they could find. It didn't seem to understand that the function would always be called in the context of a transaction and raising an exception will roll it back.

There is a difference. If you learned Pascal as the wave of the future, you could always do FORTRAN or with a little re-training, C (pointers always left Pascal programmers a bit befuddled at first). If you bet on Java, you could always migrate to C or Python. Some of the IDEs do leave people a bit brain dead, but not so much they can't make the jump to a simple text editor and command line compiler. Even BASIC was OK though you'd have to un-learn a few bad habits.

But if you learn 'vibe coding', you are dead in the water without the AI. No amount of typing "Make a game like Wolfenstein 3D but in a shopping mall with perfume ladies that take half of your health points.." into the compiler will get you anywhere at all.

So far, but it looks like Samsung is giving it a go.

I have mine connected to a Raspberry Pi and a Google Chromecast. I can update the Pi myself and if the Chromecast fails, gets EOLed or just enshittified, I'm out $30 and still have a functional TV with the Pi. Then I just throw some other inexpensive device on it.

By contrast, the 'Smart' TV leaves me stuck. If it gets enshittified or EOLed, I don't have much in the way of options unless I can figure out a way to lobotomize it and make it a dumb TV.

Meanwhile, the all-or-nothing Smart TV removes real disincentives for enshittification.

So no, for the consumer, it really does NOT make sense. For corporate executives rubbing their hands waiting for enshitification day, it makes a lot of sense, unfortunately.

The thin is, the artists WANT to keep the prices down because they (or at least their managers) understand that fans able to get tickets and see concerts is a driving force for their fandom. You don't get big or even stay big by only being seen by a few wealthy patrons (or their kids).

Actually, they own a few and have a contractual lock on many many more.

The big problem with these "smart" things is that it's getting hard to avoid them. Several years ago I was looking for TV. A few dozen "smart" TVs to choose from but exactly 2 non-smart TVs. I don't mean 2 models, I mean 2 TVs in the whole store. Luckily one of them was suitable.

Some of it will take care of itself. You can only veg on the couch so long before you die from otherwise preventable disease.

The percentage affected may be smaller than it seems. Some want to veg and watch sports all weekend because they were forced to bust their as all week in a job they hate. Take away the job (and the need for the job) and they might get more active in their free time. The unemployed who sit and veg mostly have no money to do anything and have lost hope in getting a job.

Though I'm sure there are some di-hards that reallywould sit on the couch until they de-compensate and die. But that is a choice they make and it would solve the problem.