Except we have a thriving open source software ecosystem where you can have the software you want if you stop making excuses how the terminal makes everything literally unusable. No such thing exists for manufacturing high-tech OLED panels without malware attached to them.

I'm wondering, is there a law stopping me from buying smart TVs wholesale, extracting the parts, recombobulating them into dumb TVs and reselling them?

Its going to be hard because many of them are GPL violating and so source code will be unavailable, so you will have to do reverse engineering instead of just recompiling Linux. Hopefully this lawsuit will go some way towards fixing that.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

i dont think so. theres precendent to say that you can legally jailbreak phones you buy, so this seems similar

the financial aspect might not be worth your time if theres not enough of an audience. one risk is that the added price might deter your customers, who might just buy a smart tv and not use the smart part, which is what i already do.

I bought a PS2 from a guy decades ago, back when a chip hack broke Sony's copy protection.

His deal was you pay him, he'd then walk across the street to FutureShop, buy the PS2, and do the hack.

So he bought the chips, had them in stock, but didn't invest capital in the rest.

You could easily do the chip hack yourself, but you risked bricking the beast, due to lack of experience.

So the $50 was worth it, chip included.

I'm sure you could do the same with TV hacks, so upfront capital costs are minimal, with reduced risk.

This is true, and hacks of these sort are a cottage industry

The difference with smart TVs that might kill the value proposition is that the smart aspect doesnt actually impeed the user. You can just ignore it and hook up cable or your laptop to the tv. So would people pay to remove it on philosophical grounds. IDK

We're remodeling our kitchen, and for some reason so many stoves come with wifi and bluetooth.