Though you still have to turn off the frame generation on the TV.

Yes I think the device itself is fine, but the Apple TV apps are mostly terrible and often very laggy/poorly written.

The way developers use the UI toolkit that the Apple TV provides also seems to tend towards apps where it's very difficult to figure out what's the active selection, which is of course _the_ critical challenge.

Sounds just like a poorly written app. I'm surprised Apple doesn't enforce stricter performance guidelines.

On an older Roku Ultra Peacock also isn't great but not nearly as bad as you describe - maybe they just ported over their Roku version somehow and it has horrible Apple TV performance.

Anecdotally I have heard the newer Nvidia Shields to be very fast

If you think Peackock is bad, try Paramount+, it's an impressively bad app that, along with being very laggy, will crash fairly regularly too.

Pretty much every streaming app I use (not just on AppleTV) has a hard time remembering where I left off. I now have the habit of skipping through the credits and letting the app play the last 8 seconds and close the episode itself, in the perhaps misguided hope that then it will remember I've played the episode.

It sounds like an older version of the app. I used to see all kinds of similar issues with Peacock on my Apple 4k device. NBC has put work in to make the app better over the years unlike say, Paramount+. I would check to see if you can manually update the app or try the 4k device and see if it works better. It could be the older chip and more limited memory of the HD device are hitting up against their limits too.

My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet.

I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.

My LG does just that.

The tv remote sensor stopped working (and broke again after servicing), so now the only way to use the TV is by the LG app on my phone.. which asks for permissions to Nearby Devices, Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, Phone, Music&Audio...

My samsung did this years ago. Not sure if it was truly required but I’d say this has happened.

My trick has been a simpler/faster/dumber HDMI switch that isn't the TV so that you can leave the TV on a single HDMI input and delegate any input switching to the the switch rather than the slow TV UI.

That adds extra complexity in terms of an extra remote. In my case, the simpler/faster HDMI switch is also the surround sound receiver so that moves volume as well to the simpler, dumber remote.

It's not ideal either, but reducing use of the TV's terrible UI is reducing temptation to just go back to the TV's terrible apps. (Also as the sibling option points out, the other trick is isolating the TV out of the network entirely. Sometimes the UI gets even slower to "punish" you for not allowing its smart features and ads to work, or the UI is just badly written and relies on a lot of synchronous waits for network calls for things like telemetry [six of one, half dozen of the other], which gets back to reasons to use a dumb input switch and get away from the TV's own UI.)

You can purchase commercial signage displays that are just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it connect to the internet.

You don't need to connect it to the Internet or use the built in OS for anything else than just navigate to your box. I just use my NVIDIA Shield for everything.

Dumb TVs really don’t exist anymore. You just have to buy a smart one and treat it like it’s dumb.

Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.

I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.

Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes.

I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.

If you never connect it to the internet, all TVs are dumb. I have an airgapped Panasonic powered by Nvidia Shield for years.

The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.

Which is generally easier to fix (replace) than a TV.

Yeah, that's the next best. I taught my kid to mute adverts from an early age.

It really winds up one family member who works in TV advertising, so that's a bonus.

I tried the smart tv, but then the app devs stopped updating the apps for that model or version of the OS. there's nothing wrong with the picture, but to be able to keep using apps would require a new tv. That's when I switched to devices connected to the TV, and stopped using the TV's apps. Devs will always update for devices like Roku, AppleTV, etc as there's enough users. I can only imagine the number of users for specific model of tv's OS will get smaller and no longer worth effort on the dev's time.

its a double edged sword, better hardware and experience = more expensive (see Sonys higher end stuff) 90% of would much rather drop the money on the less expensive BIG TV with a cpu that cant even transcode properly and harvests your data to offset the price. ive got a lot of family and friends that use my plex server and i pretty much force them to get a dedicated streaming device for it or warn them that unfortunately i cant help them if the content doesnt want to play.

Well, you say it's not particularly useful, but do you want a TV that runs like a bag of spanners or not?

Because if the answer is "not" then complaining about how your TV performs whilst stubbornly allowing it to download whatever updates it likes and stubbornly refusing to buy one additional device (like an Apple TV or a Firestick) to plug into it is kind of dumb, don't you think? Ornery even?

I agree that it is reasonable and fair to ask for a better experience but TV manufacturers have already made it abundantly clear, over the last decade and a half of smart TVs, that they don't give a damn what people like you and I think about how our TVs work, or that we get pissed off when they slow them down with bloatware and ads.

So the logical choice is to Not. Bloody. Let Them.

Literally, buy one other device - whatever suits your needs best (and they're all compact little things, not like the big ugly set top boxes of years gone by) - and your TV experience will immediately be significantly better.

Once you've set it up you won't even need two remotes: your Apple TV, or whatever, will turn the TV on and off for you, and control the volume, so you'll only need the remote for your it (or whatever device you've chosen).

The only time you'd need a second remote is if you have a cable or satellite box, or you're the kind of person who also has 7 games consoles of varying vintages and a bluray player plugged into your TV as well (which it doesn't sound like you have). We only watch on demand services so, if I weren't a fan of retrogames, we could get away with just the Apple TV and one remote. (The Bluray player barely sees any use, but I keep it around because we do still have some Blurays and DVDs for stuff that we really like and don't want to be beholden to streaming services for.)

(I should say, another alternative is to set up something like Pihole to filter the ads out, but that still doesn't help with crappy updates that slow your TV down. And if you use apps on your TV and don't keep them up to date, eventually they'll stop working, which isn't ideal either. Hence, again, back to the idea of a device to "drive" the TV, which runs the apps you want.)

Within a few days it appeared that the update was recalled.

It was the bad update that made videos start playing as soon as you selected them, instead of going to the information page. I get the impression I wasn't the only person who complained; I suspect that any manager who sat down to watch TV that night probably twisted a few arms.

Is this something you're actually able to do with this monitor, or that you think it should be able to do it? If it can actually display all 4 inputs at the same time, I'd be interested in knowing the model and price of that monitor. That's a feature that tends to require special equipment that's not cheap.

I'm sure you didn't intend to be arrogant and dismissive of my efforts to try to keep her current as time went on.

Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple.

One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.

I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.

That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.

This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF.

The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.

Programming a VCR was pretty trivial for me as a kid, but a bit annoying.

But then VideoGuide [1] was released (available from RadioShack). I begged my parents for that and honestly it was the most amazing product and worked flawlessly. I felt like I was living in the future.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzJuqkQbEQ

Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.

Sure, but uncle (who drove a truck for a job) sat down with the manual for several hours one night and figured it out. He was probably the only person in the entire town he lived in. Most people could have as well - but it would mean spending several hours of study and most people won't do that unless forced (and rarely even then - see all the tropes about homework...)

My grandmother figured it out enough to make sure her favorite soap was always taped. It was a "set it up once and mostly forget it" thing, with the real hard part forcing grandkids to stop using the TV during the hour it taped to avoid accidentally taping the wrong channel. (VCRs at the time had their own tuner for OTA and that shouldn't happen, but her stories were important enough to her she didn't want to risk it, and had risked it in a brief period of having a cable box passed through the VCR.)

I was so happy when we got a VCR+ enabled VCR. Stupid simple to program. Just punch in a few digit code in the TV guide magazine and it would schedule it automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkXQqVMt6SE

The last couple of VCRs we owned even had automatic time setting. It read extra data in the vertical blanking interval from our local PBS station.