Damn good point.

Unless you have root and can do anything the hardware is capable of, it's not your device. And you shouldn't let any sort of non-owned devices on your network.

Why? Cause devices controlled by other orgs are a foothold situation. And we've had countless attacks of footholds being used as internal points of attack, DDoS, and other attacks.

That also means that all your "cloud devices" should be able to work 100% offline. If not, return them as defective.

Hunh. This reminds me... I have a copy of ghidra and a bunch of JTAG adaptors. I bet I could suck the firmware out of my old model Visio TV. I already unsoldered the microphone from the motherboard.

I have a Samsung smart TV it's never seen the internet, I just didn't let it connect - it's a display for a box running Fedora, that is its entire job to be dumb and display whatever is sent down the wire.

Devices that do need to be on the internet but I can foresee no reason they ever need to talk to anything else on the network go on their own VLAN (down to the level of my VR headset since it had a Meta logo on the box...).

My boys gaming PC can't even see my desktop (since there isn't a scenario where it needs to).

Other than the "smart" TV I own nothing "Smart" because I don't want anything smart.

I'm not adverse to smart hardware.

I am adverse to being trapped with rental hardware masquerading as as 'sale'. Almost all corporate cloudshit is that.

As a counter example, I have 2 of these opengarage for my garage doors. They work superbly and integrate seamlessly with HomeAssistant.

https://opengarage.io/

And yes, I control them completely. FLOSS and all. And they just work.

"Give some other monopoly rulr over your attention"

Ultimately the choice of platform is about trust rather than capability. Apple has been a much better citizen historically than any of the smart TV companies.

Those other smart TV companies write shit software that performs terribly on bad hardware and may have ads - YMMV but that's not really "worse" than Apple's anti-steering clauses concealing massive fees on ATV apps like Plex or ESPN and causing half the western world to revise their competition laws to outlaw many of their practices. It's just bad for different reasons.

super ultimately, the choice of platform of trust is about farming long enough to get monopoly lock in and then slot in a MBA to convert that trust to cash.

Anyone who see anything other than enshittification is living on the same month-to-month timeline that capitalism wants in their consumers.

Apple TV is much better about this. I have never had it pop up or interrupt me. When it is idle it just goes to a pleasant screen saver and then powers off after a while. It doesn’t try and promote content or display ads for shows. Granted, that could change at any time, but right now I think it is better than all the alternatives.

Ads are coming to Apple Maps so it’s probably only a matter of time before the rest of the ecosystem is infected.

It is better, but I hated how some time ago they started showing trailers at the start of a show, with no option to turn this off. It’s a small thing but it’s super annoying, if I want to check out what’s new I will do it myself, thank you very much.

I'm not an Apple fan, but if someone wants a 'smart TV' (access to streaming services, etc) and doesn't want to go the Linux-box-connected-to-Jellyfin route, then Apple really is just the best option.

In my experience, they've been fine for a few years so far.

That's where I ended up; I was running a linux box with Kodi for a while, but that was a subpar experience for connecting to commercial streaming services (I never was able to figure out how to get Kodi to launch firefox on the site's URL, which would have been Just Fine for us).

I use Chromecast. But I changed the home page to show app screen by defult instead of recommendations.

This is ultimately what we did in my house for every Samsung TV.

Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.

As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.

Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.