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by dangus 507 days ago
Ah that’s your problem, you bought an old Android TV.

Unfortunately you bought a bad product in the first place.

If you get an LG with WebOS or whatever Samsung puts on their TV it’s just fast from the factory and it doesn’t get slower over time.

I have a very old LG OLED, so old that it’s curved (2015 probably), and it has no slowdown or bugs like this.

But every Android TV including new ones like my friend’s cheap HiSense purchased last yesh seem to have slow volume buttons, slow bootup, slow slow slow.

I think Android wasn’t designed for the type of SoC that is in a reasonable budget for a TV manufacturer, and that’s why most TV producers like LG and Samsung don’t use it. Plus, Android TV was very much a half-baked product until recently.

In other words, your problem isn’t the non-upgradability of the SoC, your problem is that you have a bad product in the first place.

My advice is don’t worry about the waste. Every moment you worry about the waste, Taylor swift takes a 20 minute driving commute via private jet. You have finished the useful lifespan of your device, it is probably not long before it gets picture uniformity problems anyway. Get yourself a new LG OLED or Samsung QLED or something like that. You won’t regret it. It’ll be a huge upgrade over a 7 year old Bravia LED in picture quality and capabilities.

And still don’t use the smart TV built-in streaming. Use a high-end streaming box with a good processor like an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. Don’t use a cheap Roku, that’s how you get a slow experience.

2 comments

[I used to previously work at Google on Android TV, all opinions my own]

There's a constant push for more and more features because consumers and cable operators shop based on that. There's also a constant push for ridiculous BOM reduction to the tune of individual cents being saved. Android TV is non-trivial to monetize so it's hard to dedicate a whole team for performance improvements. There's an imaginary bar for "good enough" (read not too shitty) and you get this result. I hate the result but I can't see what market dynamics might change it.

Unsubsidized "HDMI output" type TVs would cost so much that they would sell poorly, resulting in even higher prices, ad nauseam. I think we're stuck with this.

It's not even that, it's that Android TV/Google TV devices even when not using smart features have slow and laggy basic features like volume control.

It just seems like it's software that was shoehorned into a place where it doesn't fit well IMO.

Roku never suffered from that.
Even my TCL TVs with Roku were better than TVs with Android built in.