Instead of ‘splurging’ on a dumb tv bc they’re more expensive now thanks to the data sompanies sell off of smart tvs I was considering getting a smart tv and dumbing it down. Is the way to do this never connecting it to the internet? And is that the only way?
For the non-destructive option, yeah preventing it from using the network is about as good as you can make it.
For mine I intend to open it up once it’s out of warranty and try reflashing the Google TV on it or neuter the board entirely. From a hardware perspective, I expect the panel driver and the smarts to be on separate boards entirely. On mine, the Android TV UI renders at 1080p despite the TV being 4K HDR, so there’s got to be some hardware switching and multiplexing going on to make it work which means it should be possible to bypass the smarts entirely if I can figure out how it signals to change settings and inputs. It’s probably gonna be I2C or something.
If you’re not too risk averse you can probably at minimum open it up to cut the microphone, camera and WiFi antenna. Although careful with that, they tend to have Bluetooth remotes these days so they’d share the 2.4 GHz antenna, if you disconnect the antenna you’ll have to use the IR fallback. It won’t connect to any network not even open ones if it’s got no antenna.