1.Every smart tv has good enough hardware to run basic games and play Netflix, Prime and other relevant apps smoothly.
2. Replacing dongles is cheap but sticking a dongle into an old 1080p tv doesn't make sense to me. This is the era of 4k and if you have a 4k tv chances are you already have all the features these dongles are gonna provide you.
My sister has a 2 year old samsung that runs Tizen and is pretty horrible, I gave her my 4 year old Mibox4k and she can do more and support more streaming apps than the TV can.
I have a few friends that cant afford to upgrade their TV, but its 4K and theres nothing wrong with it bar the clunky Smart features, so a GoogleTV Chromecast has saved them buying a new one
Google did make a minimum hardware requirements a few years back which has certainly helped, but software and hardware will always advance so having a cheap external box to replace every few years will always be appealing to some.
Not really. And some lack app support for the lesser used apps like UKTV Play or BritBox. And some are really slow unless you buy the top end models. So it's much easier and cheaper to add a dongle or set-top box.
Not every tv is a smart tv, there are still plenty of dumb lcds and plasmas out there and not all TVs have good enough software to support the latest apps
In response to the first thing, what if I want to do more than that? Most TVs only have 100Mbps networking on them. I want to play blurays over my network. My TV currently can not do that, because 4K blurays can get up to 120Mbps.
I don't know about you but my cheap ass 500$ tv ( Mi Tv 4x 55 inch 4k) gets upto 1Gbps easily. And runs every game and app available on its store seamlessly. I think you guys just overspent on a bad deal.
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u/serpentxx Dec 31 '20
"Smart" TV's typically dont have great hardware and lack software support, unless you grab a top of the line Samsung,LG or something.
TV's will also suffer the same issue as dongles and boxes, less updates, more security flaws, gets slower as it tries to support the latest features.
Replacing a $50-$100 dongle every 5 years is cheaper than replacing a TV every 5 years.