IMO, we lost the TV and car entertainment system battle long ago. It all just went south. And those two are leading symptoms of dumb smartification.
Car entertainment systems: lure of reprogrammable "somethings" replaced tactile buttons, distracting drivers. And then the programmable interface became a sequence of terrible things, features and partnerships, completely disconnected from how you use a radio.
TV: we went from hundreds of channels modulated on a single coax cable where you can flip instantly and get immediate signal to layers of slow interfaced descrambling and streaming, ... "please wait, updating" ... "please wait, cannot connect to service" ... "service status ok, 4/4" and of course, slow loading interfaces, > 1+ minute time-to-play experiences, audio lipsync issues and balkanization of content streaming, and market juggling of rights.
Yes, I'm whining, but why couldn't evolution of at least these two have gone ... better?
Unfortunately nobody owns media, they stream everything, hence TVs with "smart" features.
I imagine it would be possible for a company to sell a NAS with all 80s movies, and 90s movies, music, games, or whatever. Right now there is no incentive to selling devices that can locally distribute content within your home because there is no content to distribute in the first place. So the target market is too small and results in whatever Synology or Plex or XBMC solutions exist.
I like the idea of a post-copyright world where you could buy a NAS preloaded with content. Unfortunately we seem to be headed for a future where you cannot even buy most media, you must subscribe to a service to stream it.
What I’d like to see are mandatory privacy disclosures on the front of the box and minimum lifetimes based on the primary function: full support for the advertised features for, say, the 10-15 years that the display lasts or they buy it back at a significant fraction of the original purchase price. We have a ton of usable equipment going to landfills because the manufacturer refuse to ship updates for things which aren’t generating ongoing revenue.
The most important aspect here is remote connectivity. Software without remote connectivity may be less correctable, but it is also resistant towards tampering from unwanted directions. With network connectivity the device basically becomes impossible to fully control. In fact, admin control shifts from you, the owner, to someone else on the other side of the planet, unless you want to take a hammer to it.
These issue need vigorous debate. 1. Do we even want every device to become "smart"?, and 2. should smart devices be designed with 24x7 network connectivity requirements?