My new TV is awful. Despite all around great reviews – it’s The Wirecutter’s TV of choice – it’s awful. It routinely thinks it detects 3D signals, the built-in apps are laggy and buggy, the user interface is horrible and non-responsive, and the remote is just as badly designed as every othe TV remote. The user experience overall is just atrocious, and it doesn’t look like it’s much better with other manufacturers. We have become spoiled with the quality of apps found on smartphones, and that just makes the apps of these so-called Smart TV’s look even worse. Many seconds of lag for every tap of a button and not a fluid animation in sight.
I hate industries that are allowed to suck because they unanimously suck together, and TV sets are far from the only market guilty of this. The disruption Apple has created on the smartphone market with the iPhone is a rarity, most markets that make consumer products suck. I mean, even new kitchen appliances like ovens, blenders, toasters or dish washers rarely follow even rudimentary usability guidelines. And this is one of the main reasons I root for Apple, or Nest, or Tesla for that matter. I want good products to prevail.