People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

it doesn't take much critical thinking to conclude that smart tvs are bullshit, but apparently too much for most people

Exactly. It's not the smart part of a device that is the problem. That's an extreme overreaction.

The problem with most smart devices today is that they are proprietary, non-fully libre and open source, for-profit, cloud-connected, corporate committee designed spyware, adware, and bloatware.

Devices that are fully FLOSS (firmware, hardware, software) and based on open and free standards and protocols are awesome, but they get easily forgotten.

The Internet and your technology can be so much better. Demand it.

Yes but I have done zero maintenance on my light switches in over 30 years. No downtime either or updates.

Its for families mostly. I dont want my small children coming up to me all the time asking for a different show downloaded that they heard about from school, and Erica's parents actually HAVE Disney+ and says anyone who cmdoesnt must be a loser omg etc etc.

I taught my brother how to do it years ago, and he got his shit virused so fast. I'm not sure if hes colossally stupid or just plain unlucky.

I learned how to sail in 5 mins from a friend the other day. It's stupidly easy.

Home assistant is the way to go, all run locally on a homePC, I have ZigBee lights and switches automated

An example is my front deck lights turn on at sundown, at 10% brightness, at 11;00 pm they drop to 1%.

If motion is detected they brighten up for a bit. On holidays they have appropriate RFB effects.

All of this is automated, none of it talks to the internet.

My current project is making a harry potter style "clock", with hands for me, my wife, and kids. Can set up some geofencing. Run off some ESPhome and the HA app, which reports directly to my install, without releasing tracking info.

Smart Home is really good for me bc I have trouble remembering things, but I'm for building my own and running it on my own server vs using corporate bullshit.

Lemmy is structurally just super reddit. It just hasn't been flooded by children yet so the discourse is still college level.

UI is too difficult for iPad babies but as the apps catch up the dumbass summer children will flood here too.

That sounds right to me. Maybe "spin" if I want to be a bit more neutral, but it doesn't look like they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Theyre putting a happy spin on some bullshit.

I may remember badly but I think in the days, the small one was only with ads and tiers were for the bigger tablet 🤔 (more than 10 years though so my memory is hazy)

I feel like for all the effort you may spend pissing about you could just go to an electronics recycling center buy a relatively new laptop with a busted screen and just use that. Just get a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, hell I think there are remotes specifically made for this purpose.

Yeah, ppl say 'if it's free, you're the product.' and that sentiment feels like it applies here.

Or just don't buy products from companies that don't respect you...

Buying chinese is like going to the guy who beats you less because he spending half the time at his other girlfriend's house.

You mean besides sell it to American companies? Or insert whatever country you're afraid of currently

I didnt see it coming. I assumed that having a device always available to add shit to your shopping basket and listen to everything you say forever would be enough for them.

Honestly it should be more than enough.

I can see the logic of being able to set certain items that you always want in stock, and your fridge being able to tell you if you're running low or if it's beyond its expiry.

Can smart fridges do that? I don't think so.

Even if they can, it's probably not worth the extra expense, complexity, data mining, security concerns, or the fact that Samsung or whoever can shut down functionality whenever they want.

I just want a basic fridge-freezer.

Even without having other Apple products. The only real benefit I see with the Apple TV — I do have other Apple products — is I can AirPlay to it. But, it isn't very stable for whatever reason. The connection will just drop. So I AirPlay to the TV itself instead, and that works, though sometimes the audio doesn't, so I just route it back to the MacBook, which has very good speakers, and it's fine. Or I grab my Thunderbolt to HDMI and plug in directly, turn the TV into a monitor — but, this bypasses the Apple TV (but, so does AirPlaying to the TV itself). Oh, and I can use my phone or watch as a remote. All in all it's perfectly fine if you don't have any other Apple stuff.

The one thing it's really lacking is some Dolby codec that people need to play Blu-ray rips. People in communities like Plex and Jellyfin complain about that. But those are like 50GB+ per movie, I don't have that kind of storage to even come close to caring about that issue. It can still play 4K content, just not with that one codec.

In fact, it's probably one of the best Apple devices out there, just because the competition is so much worse. I'd also say the same thing about the iPad, and the MacBook. You can make a case for a gaming PC, but for a laptop that isn't gonna game because battery is an issue, you're going for efficiency, it's really hard to beat the MacBook. As for the iPad, it's hard to tell which Android tablets are good and which ones aren't — or which ones will never get updated. And iPad got a lot of love this year, it's basically a desktop OS now (it's like macOS lite at this point). No, you still can't install whatever you want — need an actual computer for that.

Look at it this way - how does a business make its money?

• Google makes nearly 100% of its revenue from ad sales that are juiced by collecting every detail they can about as many people as possible.
• Amazon makes most of its money off of AWS because physical logistics are extremely expensive but they commit endless amounts of federal crimes by ripping off consumers and sellers to subsidize their total market takeover of physical goods. Oh and they make money by selling ad spots to their sellers that are juiced by stealing as much information about its users as possible.
• Apple makes most of its money on the app store subscriptions to apps it didnt write - like if you subscribe to spotify through the app they take a cut. It makes the rest of its money by selling devices that tend to have higher build quality than competitors. A very small sliver of its income comes from advertisements. Not even 1% and it is publicly declared as non-targetted advertising. They dont really have a financial interest in collecting your data.

That's the difference. They're all shit companies from multiple angles. But at least Apple doesn't actively disrespect you with unwanted advertising targetted to you by spying on you. They disrespect you by removing headphone jacks and making silicon valley executives behave like steve jobs who was notoriously a horrible person.

they'll lobby these techs as unsafe and dangerous and potentially ban their use outright, or require special licenses and degrees.

They have a strong foundation in the DRM built into HDMI. I suspect this is exactly the real reason it is there.

Back in the day wed hook up old desktops straight to living room PCs. There was no apps so we'd just go to websites.

I'd be surprised if there isn't some kind of raspberry pi mini PC with a good guinerap around Linux.

Some people will use a PlayStation/Xbox as well.

Eh, I gave up and bought cheap used Apple TVs to replace all the Android / Google TVs and Rokus in the house.

No. As a user of both Amazon and Google devices (with screens/sticks), Amazon is far more aggressive in their advertising practices. As the other guy said, neither is ad-free out of the box, but Amazon devices will literally make your screensaver/lock screen a full screen ad (even on your TV). Google just has a home screen ad about something that's going to play on streaming, usually.

If you want NO ads, set up DNS ad blocking or get an Apple TV and use that for streaming. But again, Amazon's devices are FAR more aggressive about advertising as much as possible. My father has one of those Echo Show things that's a speaker with a rotating screen attached to it. It's playing ads almost all the time.

We're talking about ads (and maybe privacy) on TV's mate...