Monitors / TVs

For TVs, we want the longest warranty period and lack of any "smart" features. However, nobody seems to be selling a non-smart TV anymore. This hurts consumers in many ways:

• Useful life of the TV reduces because features like wifi or operating system gets outdated much faster than the display itself.

• It fundamentally changes the relationship between the consumer and the TV manufacturer. Smart TV turns consumer into a product to be sold to media companies like Netflix or Amazon Prime.

Utsav explained why this has been happening here (but did not touch on the problems above):

One solution here seems to be to buy commercial displays from Sharp/NEC and add the software smartness via a Raspberry Pi. Here's Jeff Geerling's video about this approach. NEC has a good catalog of such displays in India. Sharp even flaunts their open-source approach. However, NEC commercial displays are likely very expensive.

A more practical option might be to buy any TV but NEVER use its smart features. Instead, use an open hardware streaming stick to access the content.