this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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People need to stop buying the thinnest thing.
So what even is the point of the "thinnest" tv?
Is that 1/8th of an inch somehow going to REALLY make your TV not fit on the mount over your fireplace or something?
Consumerism requires that consumers be obsessed with the quest for the best.
They achieve that by making you dissatisfied with your current whatever. Your car doesn't have the latest and greatest entertainment system. It's five horsepower slower than the new model, due to its age it has maintenance requirements.
Your computer maxes out at 64 gigs of RAM. Your SSD is only 1 TB of storage and only works at 5,000 megabits per second where state of the art is 7,700.
The new game that you like will only get 60 frames per second when you're playing it. Better slap in a new $1,000 GPU or better yet buy a new $3,500 computer.
The girl you're seeing only has b cup titties, better talk her into getting a boob job. Get lipo. Go pay some surgeon $10,000 to make your dick a quarter of an inch bigger. Go buy a new house and new clothes, go on that big vacation and make sure you put it on Instagram so everyone knows how good you've got it.
As long as you are not content with your current lot, consumerism has achieved its goal.
Is this why people lost their minds and started hating bezels on their smartphones and bought phones with holes and "notches" in the screens instead? j/k...kinda
…go on…
I do wonder if there’s also people whose current TV dies and they think “thin” is a great attribute for some reason and prioritize that over image quality or reputation or something else. Maybe someone with a small apartment or living room wants to maximize available space?
It still might be silly sometimes/often but perhaps not purely an obsession with replacing working tech with marginally “better” tech.
There is really no need to make them that thin. TVs used to be a couple feet thick and wall mounting a TV meant cutting a big hole in the wall. 2 or 3 inches thick is nothing.
Thin things look nice in industrial design. It's why phones stopped being chunky as soon as the battery packs could be scaled down. It's why EV cars are in higher demand than EV trucks/UVs. Watches became a prestige product when they were thin enough to wear on a wrist instead of fitting in a pocket. Flashlights became a collectors hobby after they shrank down to be palm sized while retaining their brightness. Cameras became ubiquitous once they stopped needing a tripod and flash powder. Smaller things, thinner things, are more attractive to consumers.
Things you wear or have to grab, sure.
Now, why would I care if my tv is a bit thinner? It's not like the thing is going to go anywhere, and I can't even see how thin it is from the sofa.
You do not mount a tv over a fireplace. The heat from it will warp the tv.
Mine's been mounted over my fireplace for years without warping.
this message sponsored by your local chiropractor
Chiropractors are quacks and looking up slightly at a TV isn't bad.
Instead, mount the fireplace DVD:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/92514650@N00/338467522](Image source)
Yeah, I think one of the problems is that thin is a familiar and commonly reported spec for a display. If MTTF were reported
and it should be!
then I think the problem would sort itself out.
Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it's based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.
I can totally see "make it as thin as XYZ" being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).
Some people like the glamour of super thin TVs, they're a bit like fancy sculptures.... But I'd wager most people just get the cheapest TV at their preferred size, with some accommodation for perceived quality or features.
What's the overlap of the general public, people who buy "fancy sculpture TVs", and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain't shit.
Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer's understanding of "the younguns and their flat-screen television sets" as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.
I have a 2018 OLED, and the ratio of comments by guests about thinness vs picture quality is 3:1.
Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)
FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like... I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it's because I haven't set foot in an electronics store in years but aren't TVs typically laid out in a way that you don't see them from the side?
Maybe I'm totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can't even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.
However now that I think about it, maybe "thick" LCDs can't go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).
Then ruins oleds too. Oled need giant heat sinks to work properly, but they've been being very thin and having plastic bags so they can look sleek. It's especially obnoxious because full array LCDs and uniform thickness OLED are much thinner than the protruding bulge that comes out on most super thin TVs.
Meh, if you want a thin TV, just get an OLED, it's what that technology was designed for.
That's what she said.