I recently read Contact(the book by Carl Sagan, still need to watch the movie), which features a tech billionaire who built his wealth doing exactly that. He developed a chip that could block TV commercials, and later one to filter televangelists as well.
For a book that was published in the 80s and set in the late 90s, it’s prescient in a few very specific ways. We weren’t exactly communicating by Portable Telefax in 1999, but adblockers were not far away either.
It’s not a device that Sagan goes into much detail about, aside from it being a new and less-than-reliable technology in the early parts of the story. I always imagined it as a laptop-sized, wireless fax machine using cellular networks to share data. Characters mostly use paper documents throughout the book, and while there are some sci-fi technologies like holographic displays that advance throughout the story, Sagan never describes anything like portable computers or smartphones. Even the internet(or its closest approximation) never goes beyond a rudimentary data-sharing network for astronomers, never open to the public.
A quick google search tells me EFax would probably work over that network, sending documents from a desktop straight to someone’s Portable Telefax like an email, so you’re not far off.
He also wrote (in the non-fiction 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World), “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
You’ll need to define a budget for “really affordable”, but it’s going to be hard regardless to match the price performance of the deck. Is $700-$1000 affordable? That’s probably the ball park for a mid-tier prebuilt. You maybe be able to get lower with an Intel Arc option (HP has some of these at $600)
Even with just 8gb of Ram you can have a windows 10 vm to do the only few things you can’t on Linux. It’s gonna be really slow but if you need it once a year it’s fine.
You’ll never be able to buy that at like a Walmart of Best Buy type retailer. TVs these days are already just spy machines to serve ads. It’s a lovely idea, but it’ll never happen.
TVs are cheap right now like really cheap. I seriously doubt they’re selling them much above cost and making the money back on the advertising and information gathering.
I don’t think any of the TV manufacturers would bulk too much at selling you a TV but it’s going to be at a price of around the lifetime value of your watching habits. You can get a 50-60" reference monitor for about 10 grand. If there was a market for it Best buy would probably sell it.
As cm0002 said, you need to define your budget first. With that you can start looking around. You can find a more capable system than the SteamDeck second hand.
For a new system, look for a System Integrator that offers warranty. Usually local PC stores offer this kind of service.
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