> There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place.

Sure there is. 99% of everything else I've ever experienced in my life have had a positive correlation between features and price. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another product where—in general—more features are cheaper than fewer. Other than television sets, I cannot think of one right now. (Maybe if I spend some time on it, I can think of another) Therefore, knowing what I know about prices of things, it is totally reasonable to assume that TVs follow the pattern.

I don't mean to argue because basically I agree with you, but a great example of more features costing less is the average midrange AV receiver which probably offers a tuner, digital inputs, and some sort of DSP as well as multiple amplifiers for 5.1 or greater outputs, compared to a 2 channel stereo amp aimed at the audiophile market - which although it [i]may[/i] measure better, probably doesn't sound any better in most peoples living rooms.

For that 99% of everything else, those features were probably useful things that users wanted.

Perhaps a more concrete definition of an analogous concept would make this clearer: Are you familiar with the concept of a prior distribution[1]? The point of a prior is that, before you get any of the evidence, you can still have some sense of how likely each event is. If you asked me whether a microwave with more features would be more expensive, I would feel pretty comfortable saying "yea probably". As mentioned downthread, this is based on the fact that 99.9% of the time, in every single industry, products that are more functional will be more costly (all else held equal, obviously).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability

Like I said, that prior is wrong regardless about how comfortable you feel about it. The real question you should be saying yes to is whether a microwave with more USEFUL features would be more expensive. A microwave with the "feature" that "it has a 10% chance to self-destruct each time it finishes heating something" would cost less, since no matter how hard you try to spin that as a feature, a reasonable person would see it as a defect.

On the increasingly minuscule chance that you're not just trolling (posterior probability!), it should be trivially obvious that what makes TV-smartness a "feature" but not stochastic microwave self-destruction is not some objective measure of usefulness, but rather the fact that only the former is marketed as beneficial with the reasonable expectation (on the part of the marketers) that some/many consumers will believe it.

If you truly don't understand this distinction, then this whole conversation (indeed, this entire posting/thread) is hopelessly beyond your comprehension.

A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

> A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.