There’s a new version of LG’s smart TV operating system coming, but if you have an old TV, or even one purchased just recently, will you get the update?
Updates can make life a little complicated, particularly when you don’t know whether they’ll come to a device you own, or whether it has reached the end of its life.
That can be the case all too often with phones, which may seemingly take forever to see an update if you’re on Android and don’t own the latest and greatest, while Apple is known to cut phones older than five or six years off from getting updates, too.
Halting updates happens across all products these days, and even affects speakers, something Sonos owners saw in 2020 when some very old products were cut off from seeing the second version of the Sonos controller and were stuck on the old one, S1.
The same can happen with your TV, and while TV operating systems vary and differ wildly, we’d like to expect recent models are always capable of getting updates.
That might not be what happens this year, however, even if you just bought an LG TV in the past year, or even the past five. If you own an LG TV from 2016 to 2020, you might be happy with everything the TV does, but also looking forward to what webOS 6 could bring to your smart TV interface. However, you might want to halt those expectations, as it doesn’t seem like webOS 6 is coming to your TV.
Talking with LG this week during the CES 2021 online show (which is all digital this year because of the coronavirus), LG Australia told Pickr that it doesn’t expect older TVs to get webOS 6 running, but that webOS 5 also doesn’t have an end-of-life date.
When asked whether webOS 6 would arrive on models outside of the 2021 range, LG’s Tony Brown, Head of Home Entertainment Marketing, said “we don’t think so”, and that the company was “99 percent” sure older models wouldn’t see the update.
That doesn’t mean older TVs won’t see future updates, either, just that the major update that is webOS 6 — complete with its new design and any new features — wouldn’t likely see release on older TVs, which likely includes the 2020 models still on sale now.
When asked about the new remote coming with 2021 TVs, however, LG Australia said it might work with older TVs, and had tested it with 2019 and 2020 TVs, though hadn’t yet tested linking a phone to the remote’s NFC for easy photo and video sharing.
Right now, though, it means that if you own an LG TV from the past five years, or are thinking of buying one ahead of the typical TV changeover period when prices drop, know that it is apparently unlikely that your TV will see an update to LG’s latest smart TV OS, even if it already has webOS 5, which will keep going for the foreseeable future.
