Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Motion for Ars staff to pin all the posts where anyone mentions their great dumb TV that they love. That’s pretty much what we’re all here for, right?
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Instacart was caught red handed displaying different prices to different customers. (They blame the retailers.)
^Certainly sounds like the same thing when ordering on your Walmart+ account.
^Certainly sounds like the same thing when ordering on your Walmart+ account.
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My advice: don’t buy a Visio, go for an LG or other brand and never connect it to the internet. I have an Apple TV and I’m happy to pay that price once knowing I’ll (likely) never see an ad on a pause screen thanks to some mandatory update.
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Of course, that's just announced as the prices for RAM and SSD are stupid, so it's more painful to upgrade my 13 year-old HTPC which can't keep up with modern codecs.
I guess I'll unplug the Vizio from the router before they push a bricking update, and tie in the old laptop until a cleaner solution is cheap again...
I guess I'll unplug the Vizio from the router before they push a bricking update, and tie in the old laptop until a cleaner solution is cheap again...
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Good! Don’t log in and use an Apple TV for smart features. It’s a cleaner interface and won’t inundate you with upsells.
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That used to be true but Apple couldn’t resist that service revenue and now the main TV screen is covered with Apple TV+ promotions even if you don’t subscribe, and even though it has its own tab. sigh
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Bigger recommendation is don't buy TVs from Walmart.
Quite apart from this specific new issue, Walmart force the manufacturers to create Walmart variants (and Walmart have the volumes needed for that) which are under-configured compared to most non-Walmart versions. Slightly under-configured, but nevertheless under-configured to achieve a a few $ reduction in cost.
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The best TV I ever had was a Toshiba, it was only like 34" but side by side with a 55" brand new Sony like 10 years after I bought it and even with settings adjusted, the Toshiba looked almost night and day better, especially for video games. I miss that damn thing so much.
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But what if it doesn’t even let you switch input sources without being connected to the internets. Hell, what if it finally uses the ethernet capabilities of HDMI cables or automatically connects to a partner’s WiFi network (say, Comcast) to suck internet connections from anywhere?
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I want to say I'm surprised, but felt like this was part of their intention in the long run.
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Everybody complains about bloated smart TV, and here we are in 2026 and all you need to do to get a yood ol dumb tv is not have a walmart account
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Google TV will allow you to set up the set as a dumb TV. I have a Sony set with Google TV as an OS. It’s not connected to the internet. For streaming I use an Apple TV box which connects to the offline Sony just fine.
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train_wreck
Ars Scholae Palatinae
There was a time when Vizio was actually a reliable, cheaper option I could earnestly recommend. That time has passed, sadly.
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Nearly 1/4 of American households don't have home internet. How will they use these TVs?
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You mean like a Google account for an Android phone, an Apple account for an iPhone/AppleTv, a Roku account for a Roku, etc., ad nauseum? Don't like it but that's our current world.
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poke 532810
Ars Praetorian
Same here, except for a TCL TV that was on sale at Best Buy for the holidays. So far, it’s worked fine as a dumb TV, and despite it being less than $300 for a 55” TV, it’s much nicer than the older, much more expensive Samsung it replaced.
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At this point, if I need a TV tuner, I will get a separate tuner device, and stick with dumb displays connected to computers or Apple TV boxes, etc. this is also what I would recommend to a user with a cable company set top box, to just get a suitable dumb display with HDMI input.
Edit: Indo have a Walmart Account, but no way am I buying a TV that I need to sign into an account just to use it for other services. Signing into YouTube or another service for streaming does make some kind of sense, but this would be like needing a Samsung store account to just watch stuff from an input, which is absurd.
I’d rather have a dumb display because integrated smart TVs are also frequently underpowered and not updated much, meaning a secondary input box or boxes will already be necessary anyway.
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Will this be like Roku TV, where you can't do anything without signing into the account (iirc you couldn't use HDMI ports either) or will it truly be a dumb TV?
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It'll be an even dumber TV if you connect it to your Walmart account.
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Got a source for this? I've been waiting for it to happen, but every time someone claims it exists, they were misremembering (or lying, but it's so believable it's probably an honest mistake).
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You got a lot better life out of it than we did. Our first HDTV was a Philips 40" from Target that was still going a couple of years ago when we gave it away - weighed like 50 lbs or more, 1080p, etc, but built like a tank. I think we had a 48" Vizio or something, probably the M line (came with 3D glasses) and died after like 3-4 years (LED strips burnt out - repair quotes were way too much).
So I was already biased against Vizio way before this.
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Ethernet over HDMI is in the spec, but that doesn't mean all devices connected to each other are going to share one's network connection. I actually don't know of a single device that actually implements it. I'm sure there are some, somewhere.
Chromecasts won't do it either. They don't share a network with anything.
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I wish you could get huge displays that weren't TVs. I'd get a network tuner for the once a year or OTA broadcast I want to see. But give me a great OLED, high refresh rate, maybe a couple DP ports in addition to HDMI, but still support HDMI-CEC, eARC, etc.
I can dream...
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You can. They’re the type you see in hotel lobbies or other similar locations. They are also built rather heavy duty, built to stay on in most cases 24/7. I believe the proper term is hospitality television.
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Yeah, Vizio is already on my "never again" list, along with Verizon and Ford.
I bought a 55" 4K TV in ~2018. It was between a Vizio and a Sony set, and the Vizio went on sale for $500 less, so the Vizio won. In retrospect, I should've paid the Sony tax. The damn thing would not turn on about 5% - 10% of the time. It got a little better after the first year or so, but never fully went away and when the backlight started to flicker and an HDMI port died, I was ready to yeet it off the roof. The Vizio soundbar I also bought straight died after just 3 years, which is pretty pathetic for a set of speakers.
Somewhere over the years, Best Buy started offering to take your old TV to recycle it if you bought a new one, so I was thrilled to pay the $50 or so that it cost me to replace it with an LG OLED.
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Yes, like the Windows 11 garbage of requiring a Microsoft login to use it. And for Home, it can't be a "work or school" account you need to create one just for activation.
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This is clearly another ad for the Apple TV. Ars Technica keeps writing such ads.
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It would make things cleaner, sure, but if you don't connect it to the network, and don't plug anything into the tuner, what's the difference?
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People always say this when the topic comes up, but have any of you actually looked at them? The ones that are even half decent are just their residential Smart TVs marked up because they can be remotely controlled and tie into shit like ordering room service and PPV. Shit that's useless in a home.
On the other hand, digital signage, those used for shit that's on 24/7, is such a different use case than a home theater that they're not even worth comparing. Those are displays that need to sit on all the time and all that matters is they're legible in any condition, such as direct sunlight or harsh overhead lighting. They display a single source for their whole lives. So basically the exact opposite of a good home theater display.
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Google etc provide a useful service.
Walmart are providing nothing but enshitification, inserting themselves as a middleman to exploit you for advertising revenue and nothing more.
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