This presumes that, now or later, there won't be an on-screen message that can't be dismissed saying "Sign in to a Walmart account to enable all TV features."
There's plenty of ways they can interfere with attempts to use the TV in "dumb" mode. Heck it could refuse to show any video at all til you've signed in.
Yep. I bought a Samsung TV that I never even put online. It pops up with a half-screen display that lasts for 2 minutes every time I turn it on . Never again.
What is the half-screen display? On my Samsung S90D (new within the last year or so), I can set it to skip the "home" screen and go directly to the last input on power on. It works well.
A manufacturer can target multiple markets and make different choices for different markets.
The Samsung S90D (a 65" 4K model) you bought appears to sell for about $1000. Looking at Best Buy's site, you can also buy a Samsung 65" 4K TV for as little as $180 (model DU6900).
Yes, there's other differences. LED vs OLED etc. But at a glance they seem equivalent to a consumer...and one costs 5x more. The $1000 TV is targeting a market that expects more from their purchase and would potentially grate at a persistent sign-in notification. The <$200 TV is targeting a market that wants a big TV and hasn't thought much past that.
There's definitely a chance that on some models Samsung would be more aggressive about enabling smart features, because those models are expected to be subsidized by ads.
While all of that is certainly true, even the DU6900 has the "Start with Smart Hub Home" option that defaults to enabled but can be disabled according to its manual. I assume that's what OP is seeing; it's a common thing to want to disable on Samsung TVs.
I'm not at home currently so can't check, but you might be right about what it is. I'll definitely have to check! I do remember being nagged to connect to wifi though, but it might be a combination or something. I appreciate you mentioning this because if I can just disable it, that would actually improve my life :-)
But don't think people who can afford the more expensive TV are also more tech-savvy. Some just want a nicer TV. Also, they are a much more lucrative target market than people who cannot afford the nicer TV.
It had a noticable array of sensors and (I think?) microphones along with a camera smack dab in the middle. Above that was its permanent ad display. The TV also has access to its own portal, which was what was on when I saw it. An AI-generated reporter was talking about entertainment news.
Not even Orwell could've imagined a better telescreen than this. You know it's chock full of anti-defeat protections to prevent curious minds from scoring a free TV.
Samsung is top of my list of companies to never buy from.
Except SSDs, I guess. Would be nice if I could meaningfully reject all products from a given company. I'm sure they'll someday cram ads and spyware into those also.
Heh, I really almost did. It started a big fight with the wife, and I lost the battle quickly. Not a day goes by that I don't wish I'd fought that fight.
I get that they could do this in a future update, but if you never connect it to the Internet, a TV that doesn't require it today isn't going to just start. (Unless they pregamed to do it on such-and-such-a-date, but that would be a nightmare for their legal department if the rules change)
Pi-Hole sped up my Samsung home and menu screens tremendously. I use something like this list [0]. The growing size of the list itself is a testament to the enshittification of Smart TVs.
I wonder if the SmartTV blocklist change history and size of commits could tell a historical story of how things have evolved? I'm aware that DoH makes this approach less and less viable ... but for my existing TVs it still seems to work fine as long as I'm careful not to blindly update.
Well yes, but by republicans on Trumps behalf. Not allowing Obama to put a new judge forward in the last year of his term, and then allowing Trump to with even less time left in his term is just a chef's kiss of hypocrisy.
When people talk about packing the Supreme Court they're talking about adding justices so that one side (the one doing the nominating and appointing) gets a majority. It's not about filling vacancies (or blocking filling vacancies) to reach the current limit of nine justices.
> Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail.
Totally disagree. One of the reasons I drive an EV is so I _can_ plug it in and never go to a gas station again. What a useless exercise and waste of my time, especially for a penny-pincher like me who would wait in like for 20 minutes at Costco for gas.
Plugging it in is why it is so awful. It takes ages to charge it and you don't get very much range for a full charge. Battery technology is so incredibly poor right now and EV manufacturers are just plain dumb until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
> until they make the body of the car harness the sun's rays.
The surface area of a car usable for solar panels is about 3 square meters. At the absolute best, when the stars align just right, you're going to get about 1 kW of power out of these panels.
In other words, barely enough to offset the auxiliary systems in the car (cooling pumps, lights, computers, etc.)
For me it likely won't matter 98% of the time. I charge at home and already cap out my existing circuit and it's plenty fast for me (around 10% of range per hour).
For those not with an overnihht charging parking spot I can see the appeal though.
I'll take the 30 seconds of plugging my car in when I get home than the 20 minute detour to the petrol station. Especially because my electric at nighttime is so cheap. But you do you.
The new Xbox is going to be a specialized PC running Windows with full access to third party game stores (Steam, Epic, etc). It won't need to be "hacked" because anyone will already be able to run any software they want on it.
A conversation for another day and I can't wait to have it, but something about this seems seriously doomed, because Steam already owns this lane, owns it well, and these days I think Linux is objectively the better desktop for most personal, PC-style use cases.
Windows stopped feeling like it meant PC a long time ago, and there's a major risk of the whole Xbox identity disappearing into the PC computing. Probably a conversation for another day but when everything is an Xbox, nothing is an Xbox, and when an Xbox is a PC it might as well be fading away Marty McFly style from our plane of existence.
I suppose what would really impress me is a Roku-style omnivore approach that gives a first class console-style experience and interface to Epic, Steam, Itch.io, GOG and of course Xbox.
You can run steam in big picture mode, and there are ways to add links to games from other game stores to steam such as https://github.com/PhilipK/BoilR
I'm aware, but that is indeed a great thing Steam offers. I think it's janky enough that if there's one way to out-steam Steam it might be making the broader PC gaming universe as plug-and-play into a console experience as possible.
I think this is still a place that steam does well - sure there is some jank, and definitely things left to be desired, but my two cents:
I fired up my…decade old? Steam Link the other day, got steam link clients on my phone, set up a couple steam accounts for my partner and kid, and turned on Wake on LAN on my desktop.
The streaming experience is _smooth_ whether it’s my phone or the TV, it Just Works and we can all play from our own libraries anywhere in the house.
I do wish Steam would clean up some of the pain points - in particular, not being able to switch users from a Steam Link feels like a huge oversight.
I haven’t touched much for gaming in MS’s world outside of just having windows by default, so no Xbox’s around since the 360, and I also really don’t know anyone who uses one. My friends are either PC or Steam, with a handful of us also on Switch. In my world and surrounding orbits, the Xbox is all but a meme at this point
I definitely notice a difference in my desktop as the host (better everything, hardwired to the router) than my partner’s old HP, but they both do well enough.
It’s probably also important to note that the most we’re pushing it for is usually either Fallout 3 or StS2, neither of which need impeccable performance or low latency inputs.
Still, for our needs, it works great, and afaict is on par with both Nvidia and PS4/5’s remote streaming in terms of performance.
Agreed. I have a steam deck and my wife uses big picture mode on a PC. And both are full of jankiness that you don't get with something like the Switch. I actually bought a steam deck expecting a Switch-like experience, and man was I disappointed. Even the streaming is lacking compared to what Sony offers on the PS5.
I do wish Valve would spend some of their infinite money on sanding off the rough edges of Steam.
Every PC I’ve ever tried to repurpose as a gaming console of any sort has had way more jank to it than I’d ever tolerate in a console, in the 25ish years I’ve been hooking computers up to TVs. Even the Bazzite box I’ve got is pretty bad by comparison. Hell, my actual Steam Deck has a lot more undesirable “enthusiast” behavior to it, let’s say, than I’d want out of a Nintendo product for example, even though it’s just about the best I’ve seen (the actual best is Retroarch with a skin mimicking the PS3’s menu, on a dedicated distro that could take it from cold boot to interactive in like three seconds flat even on an rpi2… but that won’t play actual modern PC games, just emulated consoles and such, so it’s not a fair comparison)
A common failure is the controllers. It’s hard to get a combo of OS stack, Bluetooth chip, and controller that Just Works like they do on consoles. Something always needs fiddling-with.
Video or audio out are also often a problem. Glitched audio or audio mode-switching, trouble switching video modes, screwed-up HDR, all kinds of stuff. Maybe fine on your monitor with headphones. Not fine on a TV or projector with 5.1+ audio receiver.
The UIs also bug out or crash more often, and usually aren’t that great at being a TV UI in the first place (even Steam IMO is worse than most consoles, as far as the Big Picture UI)
It also gives devs a stable target with a known market, which is nice for both the devs and the owners of the devices.
There's something to be said for having a standard, known SKU, both as something for developers to target if enough people own it, and for users to troubleshoot if they're e.g. having an issue running X game.
This kind of already exists with the "Deck Verified" label on Steam games.
That said, this sounds similar to Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and I'd much prefer that to be the standard console/PC hybrid to keep the Linux gaming momentum going, and perhaps one day I can ditch Windows for good.
The main goal is money, an Xbox branded windows PC has potential to drive sales.
Microsoft can also hopefully target a smoother user experience than a typical windows PC provides. They want this to be a valid console competitor, but just slapping xbox brand on a windows PC isn't enough to do that.
Having a first party hardware device to target for PC games can also help devs with having a clear performance target for PCs, similar to how the Steam Deck is currently a minimum spec performance target for a lot of games.
1. Console-like living room ready experience. It's surprisingly hard to get a PC made with off-the-shelf parts to integrate cleanly with a home theater system (think features like HDMI CEC, One Touch Play, etc). A custom SoC can solve this, something we are seeing Valve also do with the Steam Machine.
2. As the target hardware for basically all Xbox games, end-users who don't want to fret over system specs can easily just buy this and know they are getting the intended experience.
Whether that's enough to move units remains to be seen.
If this is true then the reason that a console would be better than a custom PC is that it would also be designed to work better for that purpose. Turning on the device when the controller turns on and sending CEC commands are two huge things that aren't well supported outside of the console space. Also it would likely run a trimmed down version of Windows and would be set up to "just work" in a way that a system that can have any arbitrary set of hardware will never be able to do.
But the really nice thing about the concept of treating a PC and console as the same platform is that you don't have to worry about why people might prefer to go the route of buying the console. You can go with a regular gaming PC if that's what you prefer and your library will have all the same options.
Microsoft are in a tough spot (as far as Xbox hardware goes at least). PlayStation is selling much better on the console side, and Valve with the Steam install base has a good shot at making a non-Windows OS a serious platform for gaming.
Their hand was forced in the end. They have to consolidate PC and Xbox users to compete.
The idea of a machine with a locked down mode that can boot legacy Xbox titles and probably run competitive games with very little chance for cheating is interesting. But given Microsoft's track record with consumer devices I await to be convinced.
Valve should be worried if they do turn out something good, maybe this will mean the Steam machines are pushed more aggressively price wise. We can hope...
It's a device with a fixed, known-good set of hardware for developers to target, which is all that any of the major consoles is. Your question applies just as much to the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine.
I mean, at that point it is a pre-configured gaming PC. Hardware that's uniform across millions of units provides advantages, both for developers and users. IMO that's a big part of why the Steam Deck outsells more powerful competitors: there are so many of them that it gets targeted by developers, so more people buy them, in a virtuous cycle.
Yes, my AirPod Pros do this too, and I've found that the issue is due to a problem with the external microphones which are involved in active noise cancelling. In order to fix the problem I had to disable ANC, and use them like a pair of basic wireless headphones, which has been quite disappointing. I've found that basically any instance of dropping the headphones on a solid floor, even while in the case, will result in this rattling sound occurring.
I had this exact problem on my AirPod pros too! It is the internal mic, but if you forcefully suck the air out from the black mesh microphone openings, it gets rid of it.
There’s some random form of someone out there who figured this out, so credit to them, but this fixed mine (I couldn’t bear transparency mode for the longest time lol)
> Applies to: Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016
Although it is technically possible to correct this behavior so that current versions of Microsoft Copilot 366 is a leap year, the disadvantages of doing so outweigh the advantages.
IIRC, it will never stop because now it has been "standardized". The OOXML specification explicitly mentions that the conversions of dates and their attributes (like whether a year is a leap one) has to follow the Excel implementation.
The first like of the GitHub README is much better IMO: layerleak the Docker Hub Secret Scanner
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