The 2011 Sony wall-mounted tv I have, decided to give up the ghost and go all ghosty one evening in February. It was as demi-semi-unexpected as the hot winds and severe storms that had blow-dried dense stands of flooded gum, and its solitary, iconic cousins.
I say that both arrived in a demi-semi-unexpected fashion as neither was expected, nor completely unexpected, given timing and inevitability.
Like hearing someone’s musical choice while sitting surprisingly unagitated in traffic; a sound to ear and soul that it temporarily sets the weight of a permanent home in a cylinder of concrete between sternum and spine. That it will happen is an unavoidable fact; that it will happen that day makes it unknown to be unceremoniously shoved in a place where it’ll be found when you least expect to have completely forgotten it was even there.
It’s unrealistic to expect an aged tv to so badly misbehave at exactly the same time as unreasonable weather expectations in the same way it’s unreasonable to not expect an aged tv to so badly misbehave at exactly the same time as unrealistic weather expectations. Either way, it provided a hopeful wet window of cause-and-effect, through which “It’s the antenna!” yelled raspily.
It was a demi-semi-unexpected diagnosis. Given timing and inevitability, some kind of electronicus chronic organ failure was equally on the cards; I was just mindful of trying to enjoy the soggy slit of a view from that window before it promptly slammed shut.
The tv needed to be replaced. Fifteen years good service was the gift that couldn’t keep on giving. A clean-swap replacement was only demi-semi-unexpected to not be a possibility, due to the burning ember of consumer choice, and an unending belief in secret warehouses overstuffed with superseded stock.
It was all a dream.
A dream of having a tv that doesn’t demand internet connection, personal data and mandatory log-in to simply function. A dream of having a tv that doesn’t aggressively track viewing habits, voice and motion spy, compromise privacy, offer streaming recommendations, banner ads and homescreen bloatware that shells out a ton of profit from ad revenue and viewer data.
Short of obsessively trawling Gumtree and local Facebook sites, and prepared for the sight of gaffa tape of indiscriminate age and adhesion, there’s not much of 2011-anything in 2026. Except for fax machines. That functional relic from the mid-1980s sought by medicine and law alike; and not necessarily familiar to all. Much like The Simpsons. And GIFs; which after all this time, still has iffy pronunciation. (Is it a hard ‘g’? Or a soft..?)
For a phone to just be a phone it has to be a landline, and for a tv to simply be a tv it has to be 1998. If it were, I’d have much more interesting things to do than being mad at how maddening it is to be strong-armed into purchasing a smart tv. Particularly since most of the stuff that’ll be on it isn’t even close to smart. (With the exception of some pretty snappy sitcom dialogue from days of yore, and anything David Attenborough.)
Is my age showing? Or just my rage?
Personally, I’d prefer to keep my home consciously dumb. It’s this conscious coupling to household appliances that won’t inevitably hold me hostage during a power outage or IT glitch, or make me a prime target for cybercrimminals that somehow comes across as requiring a level of therapy only the brave are willing to admit.
At this point it’s an incremental take-over.
First it was the phone that had to be replaced, all smartified and AI’ed. Now it’s the tv. One day it’ll be the fridge, the oven, the washing machine, bathroom scales, vacuum cleaner … probably a robot one that will annoy me even more than the baglessness of the Dyson; a gift. A gift that keeps on giving ick vibes every time the canister is full – of all the stuff you never want to see, touch, or inhale.
And yet, here we are…
Smart home ecosystems enable remote control and seamless automation of household appliances and devices until they don’t. Making life easier regularly achieves exactly the opposite with even a simple outage. People have unable to flush the toilet, or exit the garage. Many have been locked out of their house by faulty smart locks. Not all locksmiths and sparkies have the necessary knowledge for sophisticated, connected devices that can prove exceedingly time-consuming to sort out. Users can be left with no other option but to have them ripped out. (In a rage, no doubt.) Maybe even in the dark, when your smart lighting stops working without obvious cause because that’s part of the magical mystery of technology.
Which doesn’t count a brand shutting down, or devices being discontinued. As happened this year with American brand Belkin’s Wemo with an announcement six months earlier. No longer was there to be access to cloud services, remote access and voice assisted integration with Google Home or Alexa. No operational alternatives, no troubleshooting, no tech support. (Naturally.) It impacted 27 Wemo smart home products from smart plugs to coffee makers; the exception a handful of Thread-based devices like the 3-way smart light switch, smart plug, stage smart scene controller and smart video doorbell camera. The option to configure devices through Apple’s HomeKit so they’d continue working had to be set up before the end of January 2026.
For device was still under warranty, there was a chance you might’ve been eligible for a partial refund after cloud services shut down.
Chance. Might. Partial. All the words you don’t want to hear when you’ve just installed expensive products made obsolete that are still under warranty. Certainly, you could have had them since 2011, when Belkin entered the smart home technology market and my ghostly tv was brand new.
So incensed are consumers who paid premium prices for devices they believed was an investment in their home that are no longer under warranty with no reimbursement offered, a class action against Belkin was launched less than two months after the cut-off.
That’s one way to feel smarter than being treated like a dummy; and one way for the smart-arse that treated you that way to feel dumb for doing it. Whatever the reason for its forced obsolescence seems so buried in corporate-speak, there was little incentive to keep digging.
Maybe I’m just not that smart.