One advantage of modern TVs is how slim they are. It's so crazy to me now how much space those old TVs took up. You just had a big TV stand sticking out from the wall.

And if it breaks, it literally implodes.

Just in case anybody is stupid enough to believe this, there was nothing radioactive in old CRT-based TVs. And they sometimes had black cases but weren't a "black box".

They worked by bending a beam of electrons that hit phosphors in the screen, which is cool enough that saying stupid BS about "radioactive" is unnecessary.

I've never had a CRT TV that lasted more than ten years.

I think that's some major rose-colored-glasses thinking. They did break. A child with a magnet could also cause issues, at least on older ones (I say having been said child).

I will forever remember using the magnet that came with this old Klutz book near the TV in my parents' room when I was around 10 and noticing the rainbow pattern it made in the picture. And then, after further investigation and experimentation, noticing those colors stopped going away when I moved the magnet away. And then, never speaking a word of it. For, like, 40 years.

When Bill Burr's Netflix cartoon show put a similar bit in an episode it finally dawned on me that lots of kids must have messed up their parents' TVs with those magnet wands.

they will record you anyways and store the recordings and transcripts long enough that if a future owner of the TV ever connects it, it'll upload all that shit it's stored.

and they know what wifi networks and hardware addresses are nearby so those recordings will be associated with your location even if it uploads them from another physical location.

these things are all advanced wiretaps that should probably have their antennas permanently destroyed.

Fun fact: These TVs also had a self-defense system built in. One wring move with a screwdriver and they'd throw you across the room.

Crt tvs broke all the time.

Modern smart TVs: data pls 👉👈😊😊😊

CRTs did break. And they did suffer from burning.

Just buy a non-smart modern TV, you won't need a replacement and it won't connect to the internet.

There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.

All I want is a brand new CRT that I can connect my PSOne to, so that I can play Point Blank 1-3 again.

The way CRTs work is absolutely amazing. You're basically watching a ray gun shoot you and it's so quick it looks like a picture. It's an absolutely wild marvel of engineering.

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

"your TV needs to install an update, please connect to the internet", it says

how did it know it needed an update?

I am 60% sure I have seen this happen IRL

"if you go reaching inside me I might just decide to kill you" -CRT

i finally got mine out of storage and set up

it turned on 3 times and the kids got to see the static. they got to hear the super high pitched wine

but now it doesn't respond to anything 😭😭

I'll try to get it fixed one day 😓

I used to joke about my CRT monitor going “Pop” and breaking. The. It when POP and stopped working, guess the joke was on me.

First question I asked myself when I saw it was, "Why does my TV have an update?"

I bought a TV to watch videos, not the other way around. Promptly disconnected that shit from the internet and it will stay that way.

Let's not pretend that crts ware better than modern TVs. The picture was shit, the ratio was 4:3 and they had the size and weight of a small car. I can deal with a little upgrade once in a while. And that's not even true as I haven't seen a TV that needs upgrades yet.

Something I kind of wonder about this whole "every single modern TV is a smart TV that spies on you more comprehensively than the ones portrayed in "1984"" situation is this: there must surely be some overlap between "facilities that have well-protected state secrets" and the use case for TVs. Like, do they not have any TVs in, say, the pentagon, or CIA facilities, or other country's equivalents to those things? They might not need like entertainment generally, but displaying video information to a group of people seems like it'd be useful to organizations like that. There's also people who inherently have secrets surrounding them, like national leaders, and those people will also sometimes expect entertainment.

So, how do groups like that, who both have a lot of resources to get stuff done and an obvious reason to not want a poorly secured spy device sending information from their facilities and people to some random corporate server, deal with the modern TV situation? Do they exclusively use old TVs? Do they modify off the shelf ones to kill the spying ability? Do they commission companies to make special models for them that aren't commercially available, or build their own hardware? Or is the inability to buy regular, non-spying new TVs exaggerated, and theres some generic supplier out there that they can reliably get them from?