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Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

FWIW, having played around with Google's routers, they work pretty well, even from iOS. Chromecasts "just work" in the old Apple sense of the term: you plug it in, you find the thing you want to watch online that you want on your TV, press the button in Chrome and hey presto, you got your cat video on your OLED.

If you're OK with having Google store data on you[1], I'd say the Google hardware division has a lot of what you talk about here.

[1] Before the flood of angry HN replies come in, I get that is not everyone, but knowing what I know about Google's privacy practices, I am perfectly happy with that.

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I spent about an hour last weekend getting a Chromecast working again but I agree that they're mostly pretty simple to setup and "just work."

I also really love the idea. TVs should mostly just be big monitors and decoupled from the source of content. Especially in conjunction with both tablets and web browsers on a laptop/Chromebook, this is precisely what Chromecast enables. I don't think I've used any of my "smart TV" features since I got a Chromecast. It was always painful to enter things like passwords anyway.

I use Google services where there’s clear value in them storing my data, but I’m yet to see an explanation for the value proposition in Google’s routers so I can make a choice as to whether it’s worth it to me. How will they use that data to make a better experience for me?

Unfortunately I've had a lot of trouble with the quality of the first and second gen Chromecasts (haven't tried the newest 4k ones). Whether audio cutting out or endless buffering over wireless its always felt a bit janky and unreliable, even after I got the wired ethernet adapter plug. The Chromecast Audio however has worked very well.

Last I checked, the google router thing didn't support IPv6. Has that changed? I've been using IPv6 at home with a previous-generation Airport Extreme for over four years.

> Chromecasts "just work" in the old Apple sense of the term: you plug it in, you find the thing you want to watch online that you want on your TV, press the button in Chrome and hey presto, you got your cat video on your OLED

I wish. Chromecast could not mirror or could not stream audio. Eventually, I was fed up and I bought an Apple TV.

Couldn't mirror in what sense? I know that you can cast your entire screen from a desktop or from an Android. Unsure about iOS devices.

On iOS, chromecast support is up to the app. This means no streaming movies you got from Amazon or Apple. This kind of behavior might make sense from a service, but not from an appliance.

That said, chromecast has probably my favorite interface for interacting with the set-top box. I mourned moving on to the apple tv.

I couldn't mirror my MBP due to audio issues. Apparently, it is a known bug on MBPs.

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