alt Hacker NewsI agree with you that accusations need to be backed by proofs and the kneejerk reactions on HN are embarrassing to read and unhelpful. Big bad evil corp, every single time. I mean those reactions are all over social media, but I just expected a little bit less knee jerk from HN.
> In the real world, the selling data bit, ACR, and so on, is absolutely tiny dollars business. TVs are cheap because massive factories are pumping out these almost entirely plastic products in enormous numbers, and they're extremely cheap to make, and the IP has all been long amortized out.
Unfortunately that part if your comment is provably false in at least one instance: Vizio. It's a shame, I thought we were on the same page about spreading half truths.
Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale. We know they lost money on most televisions sold (not all!), and they made it up in ad revenue and content distribution from those TVs. It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
> Vizio's numbers are famously public due to its recent sale.
Vizio's numbers were public because they went public in 2021 and like every public corporation they have to report numbers. The sale to Walmart actually made their numbers private again because while they're a part of public company still, it's now thoroughly washed in such a mass of numbers it disappears in any quantifiable way.
> It doesn't prove that LG loses money on its TVs, but it's clearly not as clear cut as you make it out to be
How clear cut do you think I made it? You seem to be claiming my comment said something it didn't.
TVs are being subsidized by secondary businesses for some vendors, to some degree, but that isn't why TVs are cheap. If you completely removed that factor, some makers would be slightly more expensive...but not by that much at all.
Like people do a lot of clever positioning to grossly overstate how much they make from this. And it's worth noting that much if not most of the revenue people ascribe to "ads" or privacy invasion on Vizio, actually came from their Connected+ platform. Vizio had a platform, just like Apple does, and just like Apple they took a cut of every subscription signed up for, or piece of media purchased.
I remember back in the day when laptops had a bunch of pre-installed junk and stupid stickers all over them -- at least in the Windows world -- and people would claim this "subsidized" the laptop. That it made it much less expensive. Some people ran the numbers and it was utterly marginal, but they did it because the average person simply didn't care. If they just increased the price the tiny amount and removed that shit the product would be better, but if most people don't care and you can eek out a tiny bit more, they do it.