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> if you want news, netflix, youtube, etc.. on your TV, then there are many alternatives that are better and more powerful. Say buying a $200 desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Lots of users want simplicity on their TVs, not power. The Apple TV is easier to set up and use than a PC. (When I looked a number of years ago, it was also quieter and drew less power, but PCs have probably caught up.) The experience of using a keyboard and mouse is also awful from a couch without weird trays or additional furniture. A $150 Apple TV is also cheaper than a $200 PC + keyboard + mouse.

For an appliance that plays YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, streaming music, media from an iTunes library, and can stream audio and video from your phone and computer, the Apple TV works pretty dang well.

That said, I have a fourth generation Apple TV after previously having owned a third gen. The fourth gen has a lot of potential, but has not yet pushed TV forward. I've used the App Store mostly to get new sources of audio and video to stream. I haven't yet found any killer app interactive experiences that are more compelling than they would be on other screens. Maybe that will end up being games, but it will probably be something nobody's thought of. (Personally, I really hope, maybe Apple, figures out a great web browsing UX for the TV, but I'm not counting on it.)

For Netflix and Youtube people are just better off using a Chromecast. You can stick that into your TV (doesn't even have to be a smart TV actually) and your iPhone / Android can be the remote.

I don't get how exactly this is better. My (3rd gen) Apple TV is plugged into my non-smart TV and I can watch Youtube and Netflix. And remote is remote.

I really dislike using my phone as a remote personally. The only time I ever did so on the 3rd Gen AppleTV was to access the keyboard if I was doing a lot of Youtube searching or something.

Also, it's really nice (now that Hulu+ has finally allowed us to "cut the cord") that everything is on one (simple) remote now, with no input switching. The only thing we use the Harmony Hub remote for anymore is turning the whole system on/off (my Receiver doesn't seem to do the HDMI control pass-through), or switching to the PS4 or WiiU.

The "stick" devices are nice in their own way. But having a physical remote and a single "all you can eat" device really adds to the simplicity IMO.

I agree with you about phone as a remote (lack of tactile feedback on button location pretty much kills it), but if you haven't used a chromecast extensively yet I'd urge you to withhold judgement.

It's not so much that it uses the phone as a "remote", since you're browsing the content you want to play directly on the phone. It basically moves all browsing to the device, which they're pretty good at, and leaves just display to the chromecast. I usually prefer it to clicking around on-screen with a hardware remote now.

I get that. And it's great for work. But at home TV time is primarily family or parent-couple time. The act of browsing, previewing, and deciding is a part of that.

It's the same reason the WiiU app navigation is a big minus for me. I don't ever want to see that Mii lobby thing. Don't know what the hell it's for. Just put the apps on the TV like every other console. Mirror on the gamepad if you want. That's fine. But don't try to force it as the default option to the exclusion of the rest of the party. (Yes I realize you can "cast" it up to the TV, but is it sticky? I don't know, because it still seems to routinely annoy by going back to the gamepad.)

Anyways, yes, the Chromecast has it's place. And it's a nice fall-back when the AppleTV in the conference room is unreliable because you've got a dozen of them around the office, 3 different WiFi networks nobody knows which to be on, and the AppleTV disconnects every five minutes while your laptop doesn't realize and getting reconnected takes a minute or two and ugh it's just so frustrating... Never have that problem at home.

I find doing that significantly more complicated and time-consuming than just using my Roku.

In my experience, the desktop solution sucks. I built a Win7 HTPC for about $350, and of course it does way more than the AppleTV does. But I thought WMC would work out of the box, and it does not. Turns out Windows can play very FEW media formats until you download codec packs from the various sketchy foreign sites with more malware than content. Also, every time my generic remote can't do something, I find myself powering up the wireless keyboard and using a not-made-for-the-living-room UI to do everything. The other day my video started stuttering for no reason and I spent about an hour troubleshooting, upgrading video drivers, etc. I've never had to do this with an AppleTV or WDTV or FireTV stick, or any other appliance. Then a week later, the sound stopped working through my TV. I went into audio drivers, and I saw a RealTEK driver. Is this what I want? I don't know. Why did it work before? It doesn't work now. After a few reboots, magically I saw "Samsung TV". Well, okay, I DEFINITELY want that. And it worked!

Different devices for different markets.

That said, $150 for an AppleTV is a bit more dear than the old $99 pricepoint. It's a harder sell than it used to be.

I like my AppleTV4, but it doesn't really do much that my 3 didn't do. I tried using the Plex app, hoping it would replace the HTPC that I finally junked and replaced with a TiVo. Sadly, my NAS is not powerful enough to transcode, so I'm back at square one.. except, with the TiVo, now I have 6 devices and only 5 HDMI ports on my receiver.. back to square one.

> I tried using the Plex app, hoping it would replace the HTPC that I finally junked and replaced with a TiVo. Sadly, my NAS is not powerful enough to transcode, so I'm back at square one

Instead of running something on the computer or NAS to transcode, you could try using the free VLC app on the Apple TV to access your NAS (although it currently doesn't support AC3 audio and will in a later release). You could also buy the Infuse Pro app on the store, which plays all video and audio formats (including licensed ones) from any available network share. In both these cases, the decoding/transcoding happens on the Apple TV.

Thanks. Will definitely give it a try.

I've got both Plex and Infuse Pro. Infuse will play anything, without transcoding, and not complain about AC3 or DTS like VLC does. Plex has a better UI though, so I use it whenever I know that it works with the content I want, like certain series.

Its by far the best media streamer experience I've had so far.

Thanks, I was not aware of Infuse, and forgot about the VLC option. I actually don't love Plex's UI, it's a little too flashy for me. I really just like simple lists of content, so I'll give these a try.

My xbox one is a significantly better experience than the Apple TV. Despite what I've ready in other comments I actually find the software to be borderline unusable and very unpolished.

For instance on setup I entered the same apple account password more than 4 times despite having synced from my phone... I then had to enter it every time I wanted to purchase something despite checking the setting that did not require a password for purchases. Entering my long-ass password on that tiny apple remote is really frustrating. It doesn't have Amazon prime video -- voice search for apps, or really anything that makes it better than my xbox one. I can't upload my own videos to it to play or play from a network stream.

I can say "xbox watch HBO" and suddenly it switches from my game to my cable box and tunes to the correct channel. "xbox open netflix" and suddenly I'm on netflix.

Of course microsoft just redesigned the entire interface for the xbox and now that sucks too...

Xbox 360 in the tail years (post 2010) and Xbox One from the get go, have good feature addressing TV, content and apps. Actually, XB1 is perhaps the only device that you can feed live TV from antenna or cable through it.

The original Xbox was sold to MS execs as a way to capture the living room. The whole idea of a set-top media streaming box was invented by the Xbox homebrew community, with the Xbox Media Center(now Kodi).

Xbox One was supposed to be the culmination of the vision. Too bad Microsoft alienated their audience (gamers), by mixing messages and designing their whole interface around a hardware fad, the Kinnect. Didn't help that they also alienated so many independent developers and which left them with a dearth of software as well.

The Channels application on Apple TV (http://getchannels.com) allows watching OTA signal from HDHomerun devices on AppleTV. Nice for a cord cutting solution so you don't have to switch from one input to another. Requires additional device (hdhomerun), but can be done. I've heard beta will allow things like pause, etc.. of live TV.

The Xbone costs minimum double what the Apple TV does and has a ton more hardware. It should be at least a little better.

Mum bought an apple Tv and I winced at the wasted money. Then as I was watching Esports on twitch on my iphone I noticed a new icon. Press button, select apple TV, suddenly I'm watching on the big screen.

For all it's flaws (and there are many) that kind of integration is really really neat.

> Say buying a $200 desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Most people don't want to plug a desktop into their TV and use a keyboard and mouse to watch Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Video. It's a TV, you want to use a remote, and a user interface that has been designed for a remote.

The Apple TV isn't competing with low-end HTPCs, it's competing with the Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, and other plug-and-play media devices.

Definitely. Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash.

An example is a DVR I encountered. The "smart" part of the interface takes ~30 seconds to activate, loads icons from a remote server somewhere (how long will that stay up?) and appears to run on some unholy mashup of HTML and an old version of Flash. Don't even get me started on the UX.

Apple's coming in with previous experience of TV interfaces, a slick design team and a software team who actually prioritise performance. And I'm no Apple fan.

> Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash.

I've worked for a number of consumer electronics hardware manufacturing companies. For all of them, software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software. Their business is turning raw physical materials into physical widgets, stuffing those widgets into plastic packaging, putting them on trucks, and shipping them off somewhere. Almost universally, the software produced by these companies is crap.

For whatever reason, most hardware companies just don't grok software. They see it as just another cost of manufacturing--a line item on the BOM just like screws and sheet metal. In order to move these widgets onto store shelves, we need to source these parts, assemble them with these steps, test the electronics like so, environmental, stress, UL testing and, oh, by the way, we need to spoon in some of this software stuff or nothing shows up on the screen, but keep it cheap! It's almost seen as a nuisance, a necessary evil: Just slap something together so we can get on with our real business of shipping widgets. Go to leadership in one of these companies and start talking about software best practices. User experience, A/B testing, unit testing, re-usable code, refactoring, hell--source control! They'll look at you like you're wearing a horse head mask. Software is just not a priority--it is seen as an unfortunate cost, not as a differentiator.

So, yea, when a software company (not just Apple, anyone who fundamentally gets software) enters their market with their own product, expect it to be light years ahead.

"software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software."

The funny thing is that this perfectly describes Apple.

That's not true in any real sense. Apple sells consumer electronics, and the software has always been an integral piece of that puzzle as well as a differentiator.

Not only hardware companies.

This is how software is seen in all sectors whose main line of business isn't shipping software.

> Does this new one really push TV forward?

Just a little bit. The fluid UI, iOS foundation, app store and federated search means it's automatically a superior product to competitors such as Roku or Fire TV.

And it is a very nice package. It's very smooth. Apps like Plex and Netflix are a bit rough, but now they have a good foundation to build on, and the app store will change the amount of competition in this space - already there are three competing Plex clients, for example.

I was in the same boat, by the way: I bought the 2nd gen AppleTV, tried to like the 3rd gen, but it was slow and generally terrible. Same with competing products. I bought them and ended up not using them. The new AppleTV I'm actually using. It helps that I have it hooked up to Plex. Unlike the old Plex client you could install into a jailbroken 2nd/3rd-gen AppleTV, is actually very usable.

I had a mac mini with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I then switched to an Apple TV a while ago.

The Apple TV is imho far superior. I don't have worry about the machine being turned off. I don't have to use a clunky mouse and keyboard to get to the right app to watch a show. The Apple TV "just works" for watching movies, shows, trailers, youtube etc.

Could it be better yes. Having a keyboard occasionally for searching would be great, the UI is sometimes a bit confusing, and I hit frustrating bugs. Overall though a dedicated device plugged into the TV beats a generic computer, it even beats my PS4.

Just FYI, the apple remote app on the iPhone can talk to the apple TV and act as a keyboard.

Oh sweet, they fixed that! For a while their it had no Apple TV 4 support.

Annoying anecdote: I was thrilled when I installed the iPhone remote app but I couldn't sign in to Netflix. It said my password was wrong. But it works when I sign in to the web page ... After a little searching I find the solution: Enter your password with the AppleTV remote. Yes, it works. Why it fails on the iPhone app is a mystery to me.

Weird, worked OK for me.

hopefully some password managers will port their apps over. My passwords aren't easy to type with the remote.

Except it doesn't "just work". Some new service comes out, it's desktop first. No Amazon Prime on Apple TV. FF/REV on streaming sucks (true of all streaming devices). Searching sucks. Marking as favorites or adding things to playlists (for remembering) sucks

Every time I try any Apple TV or competitor it's never has useful and something is always missing. Kind of like mobile apps/web vs desktop web. Something is always missing.

You are right there is always something missing. I've gotten frustrated because I couldn't watch the Rugby World Cup, or various other events on it.

But at the end of the day for 90% of what I want to watch, movies and tv from iTunes, netflix, and hbo the Apple TV does it in a much less klunky way. There is almost no maintenance, no patching, no installing drivers, it works.

I bought one - use it all the time now. I pretty much only use it for three things:

1. Plex (for local streaming of .. eh.. videos from my desktop computer)

2. Netflix.

3. Youtube.

Pretty much the rest of the apps are quite weak.

I really love the way it uses HDMI-CEC to wake up the tv from sleep, and also includes an IR volume control for my receiver. I think this alone caused me to not watch any regular cable tv for like two months, because I would have to use more than one remote control to do so. :)

1. If you think a pc + keyboard + mouse is in any way a substitute then an Apple TV is not for you.

2. "Besides Netflix and YouTube I barely use it." What fraction of video minutes do those two represent?

3. The tvOS ecosystem is new, give it time. Apple has the clout to build it out (vs Amazon, Samsung, etc.).

The sales figures based on market research has it about 10 million/year.

And I am very confused what desktop setup you are getting for $149 that is going to be as polished, seamless and easy to use as the AppleTV. Remember the market here isn't geeks it's parents, children and people who don't want a huge, ugly black box sitting next to their shiny new 80inch TV. They don't want another computer to backup, update, check for viruses, install drivers for etc.

Roku, FireTV, Wii, WiiU, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and the Xbox One.

The consoles obviously cost more than $150, but provide the same services.

The rest aren't nearly as powerful as the latest AppleTV though are they?

I got a Amazon FireTV Stick for my MiL. It seems like a nice device. The interface is really decent, though it pushes Amazon Videos harder than the AppleTV pushes iTunes I feel like. Netflix and Hulu on the latest AppleTV feel "first class" for example. Same number of steps as getting to iTunes content (or one extra if you have multiple Netflix profiles). And the search is universal. Whereas on FireTV the Netflix App is kinda off in a corner and most of the content you're presented on startup is inaccessible if you don't have a Prime account.

Anyways, hardware wise, the latest AppleTV feels more powerful/capable than most devices on that list. Not sure about the PS3 or 360 or original Wii since I didn't really use them as media devices, but it's definitely much more powerful than the WiiU (I've tried Netflix and Hulu on it for the kids and it's nowhere near as snappy or responsive).

Anyways, yes, the PS4 (I don't have an XBone yet) does most of what the latest AppleTV does. But it's less focused and more cumbersome. No voice search for example. The apps seem a bit slower. (Except for Youtube, which is far better than the crippled version made for TvOS.)

Not sure where I'm going with all this except to say the latest AppleTV has it's own strengths/weaknesses and is more of a media-device++ than a Console--.

My own pro/cons would be:

Pro: Boots way faster than the previous version. Just a few seconds. Con: Needs to be rebooted every other day or so when apps can no longer play video for unknown reasons.

Pro: Board games on the AppleTV with a young family are awesome. Con: Not enough of them.

Pro: Plenty of age-appropriate games for children. Crossy Road is one of the few games my 3yo and 7yo can really play well together, and the TV experience is great. Con: Not enough more in-depth games. Where's Kingdom Rush?!?

Con: The on-screen Keyboard is the worst ever designed in the history of on-screen keyboards. W.T.F. Apple. Seriously. Especially painful in Youtube since you can't voice-search there.

Pro: The optional Controller is great. Con: It's not used to it's fullest since most buttons map to things that'll kick you out of the current app.

I totally get not making the 3rd party controller required. But it's a rough compromise to be limited to NES level controls.

For both the AppleTV and FireTV, is the Youtube app just a thin wrapper around youtube.com/tv? There doesn't seem to be that many "native" Youtube apps around - it kinda suffers from the same problem that Netflix does in that someone's decided to code for the lowest-common-denominator device [1]. I've heard the Netflix experience on AppleTV is pretty good.

1: WTF, Netflix, why would you remove proper Kinect support from the Xbox One app?

The YouTube app on AppleTV is a native app, not a wrapper. I don't know about the FireTV (on a side note, the YouTube app for Android TV is also a native app and not a wrapper).

I actually quite like the youtube.com/tv page as a good demonstration of a HTML5 app, though it has some navigation quirks. Before the Apple TV I had a NUC set up with Kodi and Chrome Launcher for when I wanted to use YouTube and I'd use the TV page exclusively.

>WTF, Netflix, why would you remove proper Kinect support from the Xbox One app?

I swear the Netflix app on Xbox is somehow being released in reverse order. Every single time it updates, features are ripped out.

It's not just happening on XB1. I am seeing that on Ps4 and even on iPad.

Try looking for genres and separating tv shows from movies in Netflix on any of those platforms if you don't know what we are talking about.

The new tvOS does not allow web views of any kind (at least not through public APIs), so you can't have any apps that wrap websites. All apps have to be native. I'm not sure about the motivation behind this.

Board games on the AppleTV with a young family

I haven't followed the AppleTV at all but this seems interesting... do you have time to go into more detail regarding the game(s) you have found best?

Ludo (which I guess is it's own game, but I've always thought of as Parchesi) is fun if long-ish. "Sweetland" is fun for the whole family. One button control. Pure chance. The youngest gets to be "competitive" and the oldest gets wrapped up in the drama of the spins of the dial and jumps ahead/penalties. And for us (the parents) it's just a nice way to engage with the kids knowing everyone has the same chance. It's totally not a game of skill, but that can be nice since you don't have to feel the need to "handicap".

That's really it that I've found for board games, but it seems like a great platform for it.

I mentioned the two-player mode of Crossy Road. My son (7yo) also enjoys "Goat". Which is like a modern Qbert? My daughter (3yo) digs the Thomas The Train "Express" game.

Then there's "Starwalk Kids" and "Solar Walk". Those manage to hold their interest a bit as well while I talk about the solar system with them.

It really does seem like a great platform for family time. The biggest issue is handing the very sensitive controller around and inadvertent rolls of dice or spins of a wheel.

I'm fairly excited to see how this develops... Hopefully the awful app discoverability doesn't crush otherwise worthy apps we'd be interested in.

Sorry, late reply to this one but I am referring to the firetv - not the firetv stick. I know - stupid product names. The firetv is $99 and has a quad core 2 ghz processor with 2gb of ram. It's powerful for the price. Netflix and youtube are not wrappers of any kind on this device. They run perfectly.

I can't find benchmarks for the actual devices, but I tried to find something comparable. The Galaxy S4 appears to use the same CPU as the FireTV (the S4 is even clocked slightly higher), and the iPhone 6 Plus has the same CPU as the new Apple TV (though the iPhone is clocked at 1400MHz vs the AppleTV's 1800MHz).

Here's the Geekbench benchmark: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/4955785?ba...

Basically the A8 uses less power and is much faster in almost every case. It has a ton more fill-rate as well, which means short of a console, it's probably the most powerful setup graphically by a good margin currently.

They have the same amount of RAM.

I'm a fan of Amazon Video. I think in most ways their app interfaces generally beat Apple's. They appear to incrementally improve routinely where you're probably lucky to get a significant AppleTV interface improvement once a year (I don't hold out much hope for Apple fixing the keyboard, and I don't consider the recent Bluetooth keyboard support addition much improvement).

Anyways, the Qualcomm/nVidia vs Apple Ax series seems very much like AMD vs Intel to me. For a casual observer like myself, the Apple processors seem to pretty much always be the most energy efficient, and provide significantly more performance at the same time. So if cores and clock speed are the most important thing to you, you buy the Qualcomm or AMD (well, not cores so much, but work with me) CPU. But if you want the best performance with the most efficiency, you buy the Apple or Intel solution.

That's just my theory anyways.

The Roku compares favorably. It has universal search for the apps that support it which are mostly the big players. It also supports just about every big streaming provider except iTunes and only plays favorites a little bit with M-Go. It supports 4k and is stable for months at a time. I would hear complaints if it had to be rebooted every few days. Unfortunately the game selection is limited. The miracast support was good enough to get through a season of True Detective before HBO Now support was added, but it's not a polished experience.

> Say buying a $200 desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Many desktop OSs just don't cater for the TV experience. The UIs are horrid. I tried using a Windows PC with Win 8 on a 32inch TV. I pushed all the accessibility settings to the max, and it still was barely usable. I had to get on my knees in front of it to use it. I tried some of the TV catch up services in the browser, no fun either.

My android TV box might not be Apple "polished" but it is very good and way more powerful than the iTV and works for everything I want it for (mostly Kodi and youtube) and for a fraction of the price.