Technology

They’ll still be available. They’ll just be prohibitively expensive for the average person, because their cost won’t be subsidized by the data collection.

Your TV example is actually great, because you can easily get a dumb TV… As long as you’re willing to pay 3x as much for it. Commercial displays are meant to be used for things like digital signage in lobbies, digital menus in restaurants, meeting room displays, hospital patient listings at nurse stations and patient TVs inside of each hospital room, etc… They’re truly dumb displays (sometimes they have things like wireless display mirroring and AirPlay ready to go, to make things like meetings easier), and they don’t have any data collection. But they’re more expensive, because the corporate clients are paying for reliability and consistency.

Because corporate clients are concerned with things like HIPAA violations at a nurse’s station, and corporate espionage. Imagine if patient info leaked because a smart TV was listening to nurses conversations and running OCR on the patient info displayed on the screen. Imagine if corporate secrets leaked because a meeting room TV was sending screenshots of a PowerPoint presentation back to the manufacturer.

So yes, dumb appliances are 100% still going to be available. They simply won’t be affordable, because individuals aren’t the target market. The target market is corporate clients. Dumb fridges will still be a thing in professional kitchens, because no restaurant manager wants to deal with a smart fridge. But that dumb fridge will be designed with professional kitchens in mind. It won’t fit in a standard house’s kitchen, because it’s not designed for that.