Quote:
Originally Posted by
Menarini
Not if you have an oled with a bowers and wilkins speaker or an oled with a technics soundbar+ upfiring atmos speakers, then those 'parts' would cost significantly more.
The B&W badge is very expensive. And they have solid engineering and sound expertise to back up that price.
But when you're buying B&W, you're paying for the highly-compensated engineers and sound experts, to design a compact lightweight system that still produces decent sound, plus for the brand's presence. The speakers themselves don't cost more than 20% of their MSRP to produce, at least not the ones built in China.
The same thing goes with Atmos speakers: they cost even less to produce than bookshelf speakers, but you're paying for a newer design manufactured in smaller qualities. Soundbars similarly are expensive to design, fairly cheap to build.
$20 for all the parts was perhaps an exaggeration on @
lsorensen's part, but for the basic speakers found in a modern TV like the C9, you're certainly not looking at more than $30. The HDMI ports are a couple dollars each, though 2.1 might cost more. The R&D cost is much higher, but it's a sunk cost, because you have to do it all for the higher-end models anyway.
Anyway, the ultimate reason is always a comparison of the marginal cost of adding the basic features (speakers, ports, etc) to 1 more TV unit versus the risk of losing the sale of 1 TV unit for lacking these features.
Suppose you're building a TV with 1 DisplayPort input, no speakers, and nothing else, for those users like me that just hook it up to a PC. Sounds good? Great! Was awesome in 2018, especially because DisplayPort is so much better than HDMI 2.0. Except that now, in 2019, I want to send uncompressed HDMI audio to my receiver, for which I need eARC. So now you've either lost my purchase, or you actually need to add 2 HDMI ports, both of them 2.1.
I also have a habit of gaming without headphones, so I send voice chat audio to my TV, actually making some use of the speakers. No deal-breaker, but I'd be less eager to upgrade annually if the next model lost that. So will you add a $10 speaker that will satisfy me, but not anyone using their TV without an AVR, or a $30 speaker that will satisfy both?
Never mind - the fact that I play games on a burn-in prone OLED TV means you'll have to build in burn-in compensation and prevention tech. There are three ways to do it: use the SOC from your full-featured TV, use a cheaper SOC and adapt the firmware to it, or write PC drivers that will have my GPU do all the work, with its comparatively infinite power. Guess which way is the cheapest and which the most expensive?
I 100% agree that it would be great to have minimalist TV models, but only if the advantage was something more than saving 1% of the price. Say, if the minimal model was just a panel with a hardwired Displayport (it's a common interface for communicating directly to the panel) and a power input, mounting flush with the wall, or attaching to a stand. You would then have various stand models, bought semi-separately, that range from a simple power brick with inputs to a Sennheiser Ambeo.
But today, that kills your W-model, because mounting flush with the wall is currently still a luxury that commands a premium. I think it's just a matter of time, similar to how smartphones, then thin smartphones went from a luxury to the only option, now all-screen phones are following suit. We recently got thin and almost bezel-less monitors for the office, and these were selected solely on the basis of being the cheapest. Thin TVs with separate stands/soundbars might come en masse too, at least at the high end, once they become too common to use as a price differentiation tool.