It’s not connecting to your neighbours wifi. Your neighbours tv can make its own hidden wifi, that your tv can look for. Once your tv connects to the other tv, it could send whatever data it likes through neighbours tv. Since their tv is internet connected it would get back to manufactures servers.

Now, I haven’t researched this, or have any hard proof of manufactures doing this. But the technology itself would be fairly trivial to implement, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

As others have said, the only sure-fire way to ensure no connection is to remove the wifi chip altogether.

Not necessarily. Manufacturers have been known to use ad-hoc networks to find a path back home.

For example your neighbour gets a smart tv and connects to the internet. Now your smart tv connected to your neighbours and phones home.

Actually, according to IBM, Mac’s are cheaper in the long run. Increased productivity due to less downtime, and lower ongoing support costs show Macs can be cheaper.

https://www.jamf.com/blog/debate-over-ibm-confirms-that-macs-are-535-less-expensive-than-pcs/

I see SO much cloudflare stuff on here, I have to believe they are ads/astroturfing. I can’t understand why so many self-hosting people would tie their services to them. In my mind it completely defeats the point to self hosting in the first place.