Mrs. L.A. bought a 60" Vizio TV a couple/few years ago. I’ve noticed over the past couple/few weeks that the picture seemed a little blue. Well, the pics from Seattle could be blue. The news shows a bunch of concrete, the Sound, and cloudy skies. Fear The Walking Dead could be bluish, since the producers have ‘interesting’ style choices. The B&W stuff we watch… Well, it looks B&W. But no, the picture really is blue; so I picked up the little-used remote control…
There are only like six buttons on it. I tried the PIC one, and it gave me choices such as Standard, Calibrated, Vivid, Game, and such. None of them corrected the picture. I looked in the user manual, which happened to be handy, and there was nothing about adjusting the picture. I called the Vizio support line (immediately answered by a person, BTW), and found out that you need a smartphone to adjust the set. Fortunately, I have one. The guy walked me through pairing it to the TV and getting it set up. I haven’t had time this morning to really try to adjust the picture, but it’s better now.
The thing of it is, why would the company not sell a TV that can be adjusted without any third-party device? Most of their consumers weren’t born in this century! Apparently, it eventually dawned on someone that consumers prefer to have a full-function remote control, and they ‘upgraded’ the control. I went to Amazon and spent the eight bucks for one. But really, who decides these things? It never occurred to anyone that people would want to adjust their TVs with a remote control instead of installing an app? Nobody realised that not everyone has a smartphone?
Why do you assume it’s only millennials with smartphones? They’re owned by 80% of the overall population and even among those over 65, about half own smartphones. See this page from the Pew Research Center. Lots of things today assume smartphone ownership.
I don’t have a smart phone, not because I’m a Luddite, but because I’m frugal. The rare occasions one would be helpful don’t justify me switching from my pay-as-you-go flip phone, but it’s sometimes frustrating the number of places that expect you to have the little rectangular beastie.
I just ordered a new TV - I certainly hope it comes with a remote that does what I need it to do…
I detest the fact that I now have to have a mobile phone to do my damn job due to two-factor authentication. And does the company pay for the phone? No! I could set the Microsoft auth to ring my desk phone, but if I am at home or in a classroom that doesn’t help me much. The other one we use to access systems requires a mobile phone - at minimum, you have to be able to receive a text message, which of course for some pay-as-you go phone users, costs money.
I bought hubs a Gamen GPS for his car for Christmas. Only to discover my computer isn’t current enough to work with it to download the maps. The IOS is one version out of date, and my device just old enough, to not be able to update the OS any more.
Now I realize that’s not their issue, and I knew my device wasn’t current.
My complaint is: They couldn’t put the OS version requirement on the packaging? Or the web page?
Seriously? Because it was Christmas, I stood in line to buy it, then stood it line to return it, at a mall not easy for me to reach. Ugh!
I suspect that at least as big a factor is the cost reduction. Instead of making you a physical remote control with two dozen buttons, they just give you a super-simple remote that has the most-used buttons (on/off, channel, volume, etc.) and then write some code for your phone for the vast array of rarely-used functions.
For many other devices, there’s no remote and a very simplified user interface. I recently started using a CPAP device that has a very basic menu system on its front, but you can put an app on your phone that lets you download usage data: you can track your sleep quality, mask fit, sleep time, and apnea stats. Pretty slick.
Some devices have no physical interface of their own at all. I bought an OBD2 code reader recently that’s basically just a block of plastic you plug into your car. It bluetooths the data to my phone, where I read it with an app. Cost? $15. An OBD2 reader with its own display and buttons would have cost a lot more.
Same goes for user manuals. Many manufacturers stopped wasting paper years ago, opting instead to just give you a link to download a PDF file. To me, that’s a win-win: fewer murdered trees, less paper bloating my file drawer, and a PDF document that makes it super easy to search for, and quickly find, the info I want.
Our new HR software at work is designed to be used via smartphone. In the meeting where this was all announced I asked “What about people who don’t have smarthphones?” *:::Guffaw guffaw::: - who doesn’t have a smartphone? * was the reply. “He doesn’t” I said, pointing to one of the cart pushing guys. Two hands raised in the back by other employees. They didn’t either. :::Looks of dumbfounded puzzlement and a little fear:::… uh… we’ll have to look into that…
Almost as much fun as the time someone in the IT department decided to upgrade EVERY computer and register in the company system - all 200+ stores and corporate headquarters - at 2pm on one fine Sunday afternoon. For an upgrade that had the whole system down for about an hour and a half. Because who works on a Sunday afternoon, right?
We’re a grocery store - Sunday afternoons are a peak time for business.
That only happened once. Not sure if the decision maker on that one is still employed at the company or not.
I’ve seen friends of mine who by most definitions would be considered Millennials themselves post stuff on Facebook complaining about Millennials. They seem to think Millennial" means “someone younger than me who I disapprove of.”
Granted most of my friends and I were born in the early 1980s, that in-between not-quite-Gen X but not-quite-Millennial period. But I tend to think of myself as the World’s Oldest Millennial.
When my work switched to a phone-app only method of authenticating to VPN, I made them give me an iPhone. It’s a tech company so I’m sure they had a box of them lying around. I don’t have a talk or data plan, it only works on wi-fi. Although the authentication app actually works even without wifi because it can generate a number key based on time like those old things you used to keep on a keychain.
I figure sooner or later there will be some application I need to use personally that will go-mobile only.
That’s what most people think millennial means. I like to use Chris Evans and Tom Holland, who nicely bookend the age range, to give people a sense of who is a millennial.
Actually, who is and isn’t a millennial isn’t the point of this thread. The point is that companies, specifically Vizio in my case, are making assumptions that exclude a lot of their customers.
I guess they feel the economics of that decision work in their favor, and if you happen to be in the non-smartphone-owning minority, that’s not their problem.
The same could be said for companies that don’t include hardcopy manuals with their products, on the assumption that you own a computer and know how to navigate to their website to download a PDF manual.
Having worked for a TV manufacturer, I think this is the closest answer. But it’s not just penny-pinching – there’s a slight flaw in the OP’s premise. The truth is, few people want to adjust the picture quality settings, and those that do will tend to be more tech-savvy, so they will almost certainly have a smart phone. It is much easier to build a nice rich UI on a phone which has the infrastructure to allow developers to build nice looking apps, rather than on a TV where in most cases the UI has to be built from the ground up, using simple 2D graphics primitives or even just raw bitmap access. To put in the fairly enormous effort to build the UI on the TV, simply to handle the relative handful of users who are savvy enough to want to tweak the PQ settings but are still using some stone age phone, just doesn’t make good business sense.
And then they have to spend the money to design a proper remote control and manufacture them for their ‘updated’ TVs. It seems to me that it would be cheaper to do it right the first time.
