[Brian_K_White]

Monitors are now starting to go smart. Not just the Apple one.

And you no longer always have the option to prevent a net connection unless you live in a faraday cage.

The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.

I doubt that will happen. The people that even know or care at all are few, and even fewer of those vocal.

[chrisjc]

> Monitors are now starting to go smart.

This an understatement!

I recently watched a review for one of Samsung's new monitors and it turns out you don't even need to connect it to any source.

I don't just mean media sources like Netflix, Amazon, TV, etc... You can literally connect to MS Office and perform trivial desktop activities on it once you connect a mouse and keyboard.

All of this at a pretty compelling price even if you take all of this bloat out of the equation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pVapqSSccc

> The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.

And really, if one of the manufactures is doing this, they all have to... There will be no way to compete with those that are able to lower the cost of their product by subsidizing it through these agents. The average consumer isn't savvy enough to understand this difference and chose the "better" product.

[Brian_K_White]

good god... every screen is an all-in-one.

Kicker is, I don't even necessarily mind that as far as it goes.

As time goes on it's just sort of inevitable that more and more functions get performed by little computers instead of hardcoded electronics.

There is some engineering argument against that. It makes systems more complex and thus less robust and generally less performant.

It's just that it also makes them more flexible and in some ways makes the hardware simpler even though a cpu is more complex than a few diodes. It's simpler once a cpu is taken as a black box unit where the complex magic is all hidden inside, and it's cost to design and produce is amortized to nothing by economy of scale. And it allows for potential better perfmance through tuning that isn't available in a fixed system.

So fundamentally as a general rule applied to just any random thing, you can't really say the cpuization of more and more ordinary devices and functions is necessarily a net negative.

What makes it all bad is only who controls all these cpus and what purposes they put them to.

If my freaking tv was open source, fully open including all the special modules for wifi and hdmi and booting etc, I would have no problem at all that my monitor now has a cpu and ram and net connection. Or at least a whole lot less problem.

It's only that "Who is this stuff working for?" that makes it bad.

I wish I could somehow poison the money I pay for the TV with my own agenda against the wishes of the manufacturer and retailer the way they have my tv. So that the money would somehow do my bidding after I gave it to them, just the way the tv does for them after they gave it to me.

[JohnFen]

Maybe it will be necessary to do what has to be done with newer cars: physically disable the radio transceiver.

[blable2]

Uh oh... this comment brings it to the front of my mind and seems correct.

[kjs3]

We should start a bidding pool for which monitor manufacturer starts stuffing ads onto the screen first.