Comment by ssmoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssmoot | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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