I believe several different manufacturers will attempt to connect to any open Wi-Fi in the area.

There were some discussions in the same spirit on previous smart TV threads on HN but I'm not fully sure if there was any real example, or was it just hypothetical discussion which became an urban legend. Any particular examples other than "people say"?

I don't see why they can't make a deal with Comcast to have access to their public Wi-Fi network so that their Smart TV's "just work".

Wait until TVs contain their own cellular modem that can connect without your approval

Did that happen for real?

If you check the other comments in this thread, there aren't well documented reports, just hearsay. Given that this is so trivial to replicate (all you need is a smart tv and router/smartphone tethering), you'd think that if the claim were true there would be well documented cases of it happening.

Soon, I'll have to put a WiFi jammer near my TV.

Surround it in a chicken wire Faraday cage?

Wow, thanks for the heads up!

Smart TVs have awful menus and incredibly slow boot times even when you turn the internet off.

We have a Sony from maybe 8 years ago and it’s fine. Boot time is only a few seconds. Certainly I hardly notice any wait when I grab the Apple TV or Switch and wake it up. It switches to the appropriate input automatically as it wakes. That’s about all we use it for.

It’s a Smart TV in theory but we have never used its ‘features’. It’s not connected to any network and it doesn’t seem to try to connect to wifi sneakily.

Audio is connected out to an amp and speakers and sounds fine.

If it ever breaks (not sure if LCD has a finite lifespan) we’d probably get something similar but would be checking it has the same ability to just act like a monitor with auto input switching and audio out.

Well, some do, sure. I got a new LG CX last month and it's incredibly fast - switches on like my CRT TV used to, it's almost instant. And all the apps work very quickly, menus don't stutter at all......huge change from a Bravia TV I had before, that was like "press a button and wait 10 seconds for something to happen" and you couldn't change the input for at least 30 seconds after switching it on.

Not all of them. My parents LE OLEDs power up faster than my older "dumb" Panasonic plasma.

Samsung TVs menus and response times are crap, however. Not sure how they are so wildly popular.

You don’t need to use the smart features. The point is the best TV for the money is a smart one.

Did you read the comment you replied to ? There are no mentions of using the smart features at all, he's talking about useless menus and slow boot time.

I assumed by ”menus” he meant navigating those smart features. Not sure what other menus are frequently used? Settings? Inputs? If you even need to navigate a menu (fast or slow) for everyday use, it must have a terrible UX to begin with.

The smart features are indeed slow on most TVs. Boot times vary.

On some Samsung TVs I have used, and least one model of either TCL or Visio non-smart menu functions are slow and clumsy. Input switching on one "smart" TV in particular (I'm pretty sure it was a Visio) was like a four step process instead of a simple button press. It was really eye opening just how bad designers could screw up something that should literally be a one button press. You can't assume anything with new electronics - some of the UI designs are stupendously horrible.

If you want to constrain yourself from even having that option. Say you only want to watch dvd's or presentations on it but not browse internet/yt/other major 'filler' time wasters. If id buy a tv id probably get a dumb one because of this.