Introduction

I’ve talked about the Unix philosophy on this website before, but I would like to give another example of it being breached for the worse. I have written another article mentioning TV before, and I must say it makes this site feel dirty now that there are two of them! The example of the Unix philosophy being breached that I’m going to give is the existence of smart TVs. And yes, I do think that it is important for the Unix philosophy to apply to hardware.

How?

Instead of having a “box” to have your apps, recordings, music ect on, it is now all built into the TV itself. The TV now has all of the features of the box built into it, making the box, unless it has extra channels, obsolete.

What’s wrong with this?

Have you noticed how slow these smart TVs boot up? They have a full operating system on them! Say you wanted to use the TV for other purposes that you wouldn’t use the box for, you now have to wait 30s for it to turn on if you fully turned it off. Another reason is that if you do use a box, you have now paid for your TV to have extra features you’ll never use, especially now that it’s impossible to find so called “dumb-TVs”. Finally, let’s your TV’s operating system is no longer supported. Instead of only having to upgrade to a new box, you now have to buy a whole new TV!

Conclusion

This is only a minor example of why this philosophy is so important, but every little adds up! I may be making a fuss over not that big of an issue, but I hope this has demonstrated to you the benefits of following the Unix philosophy.

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