> The newer and better google tv streamer 4k is half the cost.
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I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.
All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.
You haven't flown with a modern system than. I was in Cathay's Aria suite on their refurbished 777s and it was the most fluid experience ever. Frankly smoother scrolling than on my iPad but on a 24" 4K screen. Magical!
Not to mention the non-first-party Google TV sticks/dongles. The Onn ones from Walmart range from $15-50 depending on how many bells and whistles you want. I really don't know why one would pick anything else.
I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.
I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.
Elgato's Eve app exposes all sorts of fun stuff in HomeKit that you can't do with the native Home app.
I get the impression they want you to use other apps to access HomeKit (the Home app didn't even exist for the first one or two releases of iOS with HomeKit). Which feels very un-Apple, but whatever.
The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.
I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.
Any version of the Nvidia Shield TV can do this, even the original from 2015. I’d be more surprised to find a streaming stick today that can’t handle direct playing 4K HDR remuxes from Plex
I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.
All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.