So it's not even that it won't be long; I'm sure they already have designs and are just waiting for eUICC support to catch up.

There has never been a shred of evidence for any TV model actually doing this despite how often it's speculated about in comment sections.

It's kinda weird how the most sensible, straightforward mitigation for the TV spying people claim to be concerned always gets this evidence-free FUD thrown out to claim it's pointless.

I have seen open wifi reachable from places i've lived on. Spotty and intermittent connection but there. Apartment buildings with businesses on the 1st floor are also common now, those businesses may have open wifi, etc.

Linus Tech Tips showed it can be done reasonably easy actually

Its job is to do an exact reproduction of the HDMI digital incoming signal with no interpretation.

I guess I should have specified this.

Not to mention that technology moves forward and you can replace these if new models come out that have better features or are more aligned with your privacy preferences.

It’s malicious.

It seems to be misconstruing the fact that TVs will scan nearby networks for fingerprinting, but they don't _connect_ to those networks. It would be very very easy for someone to reproduce if they did

That said, open networks have become a bit of a rarity; the only ones I can see are captive portal networks, and none of those from my home.

That's not actually how HDMI-CEC works. HDMI-CEC switches aren't KVM switches that only do HDMI.

An HDMI-CEC switcher box (or devices with that functionality built into them, like many soundbars) doesn't act as its own isolated sub-HDMI-CEC bus, where the switch presents to its downstreams as the root HDMI-CEC device, catching (without bubbling) <Active Source> messages from said downstreams, selecting one downstream to be active in an internal sense, and then presenting itself to its upstream connected TV or what-have-you as if it's one leaf-node source whose video+audio signals just-so-happen to be those of the currently-selected downstream.

Rather, at an HDMI-CEC level, an HDMI switch is a lot more like a USB switch: it passes through all the CEC message broadcasts from all of its downstream source devices through to its upstream receiver device (and vice-versa), sometimes also interpreting them in turn for effect; and the root host device can actually see the whole tree topology, including any switches.

(Fun fact: HDMI-CEC devices have four-step hierarchical addresses, that look like IP addresses, describing at each step the physical socket-number offset on the upstream device that connects said upstream to the given downstream. The TV is always 0.0.0.0. Whatever's plugged into the TV's first HDMI socket is 1.0.0.0. If that thing is an HDMI switcher box, then whatever's plugged into its first downstream HDMI socket is 1.1.0.0. And so on. All of these devices can see and talk to one another using these addresses, at all times. It's a network!)

Importantly, this means that if a TV is plugged into an HDMI switcher box, which in turn has several source devices plugged into it, then the TV will still be aware of, and can still hear and speak to, all the inactive sources downstream of the switcher box, not just the active one.

Which in turn means that if your TV is really stupid in the way it handles HDMI-CEC (e.g. trying to "argue" with sources about who's supposed to be active on wake, with the TV trying to force the last-active source and the source that woke the TV trying to force itself as the active source), then putting an HDMI-CEC switcher box in between will by no means improve things. They'll still be arguing, now "through" the switcher box; and the switcher box will itself be doing additional things in response to seeing these messages. Where previously you had O(N) HDMI-CEC problems, now you'll have O(N log N) HDMI-CEC problems.

But hey, at least your leaf-node sources in this tree all show up in the TV's input switcher menu! That was definitely worth making all this mess, HDMI Forum! :P

It doesn't seem like it should be so hard, but it has broken and fixed itself so many times that I really don't know what I should be looking for.

I personally would love to run Omarchy on my TV and all the customization that provides.