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Comment by OldTimeCoffee | Hacker News Reader

That's great, until they stop making the ad free version. It's like TVs, there are no high end ad free TVs now.

Interesting, I did some quick Googling and was able to find a good handful of 2020 models with no ads, but none for 2021. I'll take your word for it that they don't exist, but the fact that this is the first year where that appears to be the case is not strong evidence to me that this is the steady-state of the TV market.

You make a good point that it might not be the steady state of the display market, but I think it is for the majority of TVs today.

As alternatives, you can buy commercial displays that are effectively TVs (with HDMI in), however they lag in specs and lack some features. You can also buy hospitality versions of TVs as 'dumb' TVs for a similar price, but these also tend to have lower specs. You can buy large format computer monitors (55" is about the highest I've seen) but they are substantially more expensive (roughly 3x more expensive) and typically use DisplayPort instead of HDMI.

I only learned about the options because I'm looking to replace my 2013 Plasma TV that has a power supply problem.

Good to know, thanks. I was actually going to buy a TV a couple of weeks ago, but ended up deciding to make my large monitor do double-duty instead of stuffing another screen into my "cozy" new place in Manhattan. It's good to know that I dodged a bullet: it's easy enough for me to avoid ads that when I do come across them, I find them pretty jarring.

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