this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it's based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.
I can totally see "make it as thin as XYZ" being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).
Some people like the glamour of super thin TVs, they're a bit like fancy sculptures.... But I'd wager most people just get the cheapest TV at their preferred size, with some accommodation for perceived quality or features.
What's the overlap of the general public, people who buy "fancy sculpture TVs", and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain't shit.
Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer's understanding of "the younguns and their flat-screen television sets" as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.
I have a 2018 OLED, and the ratio of comments by guests about thinness vs picture quality is 3:1.