Henry Blodget is worth listening to. First off all he’s smart and eloquent–not fancy eloquent, just a good plainspoken communicator. Second, he’s been through the wringer and emerged, it seems, with a mandate not to waste time–his or anybody else’s. This is especially helpful when he’s assessing things, which he sometimes does for Business Insider, where he’s the CEO. A former first-rate generator of hype as a Wall Street analyst, Blodget has a built-in hype detector–as Hemingway might say.
You know what’s hype? “4K” HD TVs. Not quite as big a load of hooey as 3D TVs were a few years ago, but pretty overrated. “4K TVs do, in fact, look sharper than regular HD TVs,” concedes Blodget on his encounter with a wall of them at CES in Las Vegas. But “they do not offer anywhere near the same leap in sharpness and enjoyment that the jump from regular-def to high-def did.” And there you have it. Worth the money? The hype-detecting Blodget says no way. And the curved TVs, which make some people think they’re getting the Ferrari of TVs? Also bunkum. No discernible advantage to the curve. This should make you feel better. Despite all the aspirational pressures put on by the “next new thing”–rest assured that your current TV is pretty good. Watch with joy. It’s the golden age, after all.
