Let's not forget about the reliance on services. My second generation Apple TV can no longer view YouTube because it will not be updated to Google's new authentication scheme. So I have a product that does less today than the day I bought it.
This is one of the reasons I have no interest in a "smart TV".
I want a good quality screen, a good quality sound system, and enough connectivity to get signals to them at the highest quality they can use. Updates to where those signals come from should not require physically swapping large and extremely expensive equipment. That is just crazy.
And yet today my TV can hang while showing broadcast TV because someone changed a compression algorithm and caused the decoding software to glitch, and when I put a Blu-Ray in my player often the first thing I see is a warning that I might have to update the firmware in the device just to watch the movie.
This is not progress, and the sooner we go back to separating communications devices/protocols/software from the main hardware in this sort of situation and then using appropriate safeguards and updates on the things that actually need them with everything else properly isolated, the better the world will be.
Comments
Let's not forget about the reliance on services. My second generation Apple TV can no longer view YouTube because it will not be updated to Google's new authentication scheme. So I have a product that does less today than the day I bought it.
This is one of the reasons I have no interest in a "smart TV".
I want a good quality screen, a good quality sound system, and enough connectivity to get signals to them at the highest quality they can use. Updates to where those signals come from should not require physically swapping large and extremely expensive equipment. That is just crazy.
And yet today my TV can hang while showing broadcast TV because someone changed a compression algorithm and caused the decoding software to glitch, and when I put a Blu-Ray in my player often the first thing I see is a warning that I might have to update the firmware in the device just to watch the movie.
This is not progress, and the sooner we go back to separating communications devices/protocols/software from the main hardware in this sort of situation and then using appropriate safeguards and updates on the things that actually need them with everything else properly isolated, the better the world will be.