cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/38938821
No thanks I’ll stick with my Apple TV
All of my TVs have never seen an internet connection. I know the Apple hate is strong, but I’ve been throwing ATVs behind them since they were first released. No ads, no BS. Just a very clean experience that has never changed. I couldn’t imagine thinking putting a Google device from the largest advertising company on the planet would be some kind of upgrade.
All of my TVs have never seen an internet connection.
I don’t want this device, or one like it, because it’s proprietary and there are good, open “streaming/media/PVR device what connects to a TV” devices out there. I can get HTPC hardware and put Kodi or MythTV on it.
But.
This isn’t a TV. It’s a device that connects to the Internet on one side and to the TV on the other, like a cable box.
For me, at least, there’s a very large difference there. I absolutely do not want a TV that connects to the Internet for a long, long range of reasons. I want a TV that is a dumb display. I want it to be a good display, but just a display.
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All-in-one devices need to get thrown out when some part of them is obsolete. The streaming aspect has been rapidly changing, as well as the computing aspect. Sometimes new security issues arise. Sometimes new functionality (like wireless) arises. Dumb displays, in contrast, can often serve for a very long time. You can use an old, analog TV quite some decades after its manufacturer has gone out of business. I want a modular setup, not an all-in-one, given the considerable disparity in when each component is likely to become obsolete. Same thing with stuff like building Android computers into cars – that Android computer is likely going to be obsolete long before the car is mechanically obsolete.
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A “smart” TV sees and can act on everything that you’re viewing. An attached box only knows about what it is outputting to the TV.
I’d also add some other points, not specific to the all-in-one aspect.
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You may not want to use a commercial streaming service at all. But if you do, I’m not aware of any that offer a no-log policy. I mean, personally, I get a lot of good out of YouTube and would happily buy YouTube Premium if I could be certain that it’d come with a no-log policy, but what Google’s selling, as best I can tell, is no ads. If I pay for YouTube Premium, it just reliably links my financial information to my profile. I don’t want that. And the same is probably, though I haven’t gone through and audited them, true of other streaming services. Frankly, if I were to buy one, I’d rather have any such service that might be data-mining me on a little box that only talks to my TV and the Internet, not living on an Android device or personal computer that I use.
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Even if a company doesn’t do ads, they’ll likely outsource it to someone. Like, even if a company offers a commercial service and has premium, ad-free service, my guess is that they will probably also have an ad-supported mode of operation to appeal to customers who don’t want to pay the fee. I mean, most television in the US, even in the pre-Internet era, traditionally has been substantially ad-supported. If a service cannot insert ads, then people have found other routes to get ads in front of people’s eyes, like paid product placement in the actual media that you’re watching. Even if I were going to watch ads, I’d rather have them separate from the media that I’m watching than worked into it.
Sure, the twelfth time‘s the charm.
If you bought an Apple TV in 2015 you will still get at least this years tvOS update, if not more. How many devices has google announced and buried since then?
This product looks awful.
First, ever since they added ads to Google TV back in 2021 (even on the Nvidia Shield TV), it’s been a subpar experience. Well, it was for me, at least - maybe it’s improved, but I switched to Apple TV as a result and haven’t looked back.
Second, why would anyone get this over an Nvidia Shield TV or an Apple TV, other than ignorance or an incredibly strict budget? The Apple TV 4K is $130/$150 new and the Shield TV is $150 new. The Shield TV, which came out in 2017, is faster than this. The Apple TV 4K is 16x faster. And if you get either refurbished, get an older Apple TV,
For anyone on a strict budget, the $30-$50 Chromecasts make way more sense than this device. Yes, they’re ending production of those, but there are still competitors near that price point.
The only thing I can think of is that they’re banking on brand recognition or are hoping the segment of people without smart home hubs who are unaware of alternatives (like the $35 SmartThings Hub Dongle) and who aren’t in the Apple ecosystem is big enough.
The Nvidia Shield is already the rival for the Apple TV.
If only Apple added support for bitstreaming I’d replace my Shield with an AppleTV in a heartbeat.
Don’t get me wrong, the Shield plays everything you throw at it. The hardware is great but the software is so janky. It’s often slow to respond to input, it needs a reboot every couple of days because it just gets more laggy and choppy over time. Sometimes it just forgets my TV supports Dolby Vision until I reboot it. Support from Nvidia seems to have dried up as well.
Just posted about ATV switch from shield myself. I agree with you, the bitstream issue is noticeable on my atmos setup for sure, but all and all I got so fed up with the exact issues you described that I threw in the towel and switched. Overall I think it’s worth it. With some adjustments in my sub crossover I’ve compensated for sound issues a little. I held out because there were all these rumors about Apple finally releasing a new appletv, but now looks unlikely to happen. You have shield or pro? I had both and at first I really didn’t find a whole lot of difference in performance, but for some reason with time the shield tube really started having far more issues than the pro.
I have the 2018 pro. The problem with lack of bitstreaming is that no matter what you adjust, you won’t get 3D audio (i.e. height speakers) out of the LPCM streams. You can do DD+Atmos on streaming services but you miss out on TrueHD+Atmos and DTS:X on bluray backups. That’s not something I want to give up.
“That CPU bump probably means this thing still falls short of the Nvidia Shield TV and Apple TV 4k” Which is just pathetic. I left my Shield for the apple TV. The processor performance is just better on ATV. It’s so much more pleasant to have snappy response times in these devices. Slower than shield sounds awful to me. I also noticed better speed test times on my ethernet ATV than my shieldpro ethernet.
