[close04]

I own multiple FireTVs, Google’s Android TV, and an Apple TV and for almost everything I do the AppleTV is far ahead.

The only thing the FireTV had as an edge was the Xbox game streaming app which worked fine over WiFi6E. Otherwise it was absolutely ad-ridden, poor UI/UX, and Amazon’s apps suck on any platform. Since I no longer use the Xbox stuff, the stick and the older versions I have line the bottom of some drawer.

The Android TV turned out be almost as ad ridden as the Fire Stick and no obvious outstanding features. Works ok though. I wanted it to sideload some TV apps from another country to stream those TV channels. But the Android apks didn’t behave well on Android TV so into the drawer it went.

The AppleTV can’t run those apps either, they’re not in the store but at least it’s not showing ads and the UI/UX and performance are top notch. Integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem really brings value to me. And that brings me to probably the most important point.

In the end what matters more is what ecosystem you are or want to be in. Unless you have a super specific requirement or ecosystem preference then generally I’d rank them Apple TV > Android TV > Fire Stick. Amazon doesn’t have an ecosystem to speak of so it hard to take it as a serious competitor to Google and Apple.

[cosmic_cheese]

The delta in power between Apple TVs and most other streaming boxes/dongles is absurd. Even the now ancient 2017 Apple TV 4K has the muscle to brute force decode a lot of video that isn’t natively hardware accelerated, meanwhile there’s piles of brand new boxes/dongles that are hopelessly weak and don’t have a prayer of being able to handle the same files. The gap is more like a canyon if comparing against the current Apple TV model, and the upcoming refresh is probably going to make it basically a Mac Nano in terms of horsepower.

Yes they’re more pricey, but you’re getting a lot more hardware and better longevity for that money.

[ryandrake]

It's incredible how consistently bad Set Top Box (and now some embedded-in-tv) products have been, going all the way back to the 90s. It's like every one of these STB manufacturers follows the same playbook: 1. Cut hardware performance down to the absolute bare minimum required to decode some insufficiently selected, average quality video. 2. Make interaction with a remote control as laggy and painful as possible, while also providing stupid [company specific] buttons on the remote that nobody uses. 3. Have no consistent design language or apparent UX research for the software's on-screen GUI, using misaligned clipart images and fixed-width shit-tier fonts for text. I used to even develop these boxes back in the day, and they've always been neglected engineering-wise, built by the lowest bidder so they are as cheap and fragile as humanly possible.

[cosmic_cheese]

To make matters worse, the old style set top boxes didn't even have any power management, making them electricity hogs and space heaters despite being so pathetically weak. At least the modern ARM/Android borderline-manufactured-ewaste-TV-product can idle with reasonably low power usage, but the bar is so low it's underground.

[kernal]

Google 4K TV with ProjectIvy, SmartTube and OnStream blows away Apple TV.

[indigodaddy]

The hardware is likely still inferior though?