It is futile to expect the TV to be smart and support all sorts of apps and hardware only to be abandoned by the manufacturer years down the line. The only correct way to buy a TV imho is to hunt for a dumb but excellent display properties and get a streaming device such as Google TV Streamer, Apple TV or DIY x86 HTPC.

>DIY x86 HTPC

ARM slander was not warranted

Are there DIY Arm boards that make a good HTPC? Do they have hardware video decoding?

TVs are made with BOM of like 10$ for the SoC, so it's the cheapest crap available.

Then again - none of the streaming services are streaming at anything remotely close to 100Mbps so I doubt they consider it necessary to upgrade to GbE.

Unfortunately we're the weird ones for wanting to stream >100mbps content.

My 2020 LG CX has a USB 2.0 port and I get ~300mbps with a gigabit adapter, if the TV you ended up with has a USB port it's worth a try.

What >100mbps content is there? 4K bluray just needs a bigger buffer to handle >100mbps spikes (Kodi for example offers this) and Moonlight/Apollo/etc is well into diminishing returns

4k blu-ray remuxes regularly break 100mbps for long enough to cause problems on my TV, unless I use either wifi or the USB adapter. Others have done investigations showing in some movies the bitrate will exceed 100mbps for minutes at a time.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/eoa03e/psa_100_mbps_i...

With what feels like weekly posts about someone being shocked their smart TV is showing them ads, I'm surprised you looked for gigabit for your TV.

I've had a smart TV for over 5 years and never connected it to the Internet.

I connected my Samsung TV to the WiFi for the first time two weeks ago because I wanted to play with the multi-screen-view thing, and it didn't appear to work with two HDMI cables.

It has not shut up asking me to update the fucking thing. Every time I turn the TV on, about twenty seconds later an update prompt will pop up, and it will not go away until I actively dismiss it. This happened even after disconnecting and forgetting the wifi. Never again.