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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

I considered an apple tv at one point. My fiancee is all in on apple otherwise, and the roku/blu ray/smart tv for various services was getting a little cluttered.

Then I went to a friends house, and used his xbox one. It does everything all of these systems do, streams every major provider, and uh, it's also an xbox. Since then we've ditched every other device in the living room.

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It's also physically huge, draws more power, and costs more. And the UI is a bit "clunky" compared to tvOS.

Yeah, if you play games, it makes sense. But, for straight media streaming, I'll take the Apple TV.

For straight media streaming, most people will just take "nothing" though, since their TV does the job fine (and even a better job if you watch UHD content).

Until the embedded app in your smart TV is orphaned/deprecated when streaming providers change protocols etc.

Or you get pwned when exploits some terrible unpatched security flaw in your unupdated TV software.

When that happens I'll get something cheap that supports UHD, it's really impossible to justify the price of an Apple TV when the competition does more for less.

Honest question... do any TV manufacturers provide a high-quality UI for their "smart" features? I've used a few and they are all usually pretty awful.

WebOS and Android TV are pretty decent.

Vizio's mid-range TV's are just integrated Chromecasts, which I like quite a bit.

the newer 4K Samsung's have a stripped down version of Android for TV's to make them 'smart'. You get some limited apps and can cast. I've tried it out on friends setup and it works decently. For the average consumer it's probably awesome.

Samsung smart TVs use Tizen, not Android TV.

Any TV with built in Roku support.

Apple TV seems overkill for straight media streaming; a Chromecast likely draws even less power, is even smaller, and costs much less. :)

Most people will simply evaluate this on the fact that Apple TV is $150. But if you want streaming, Chromecast/Fire/Roku are $35 and for streaming + high-end gaming, PS4/XBone are $250. The pricing of Apple TV makes no sense at all among the competition.

It would make perfect sense if they'd bundled a controller (and/or made it more straightforward to have ipads/ipods/phones usable as controllers) and put an A8X in it.

It would've been the middle ground. Not just streaming, but not as hardcore as an XBox/PS4 (which weren't $250 when the AppleTV launched.)

The big mis-step of the 4th gen AppleTV is that they didn't pick any direction for it. It's a bit like the first-gen Watch. They just threw a bunch of crap at the wall and expected the early adopters to sift through it.

Don't forget the blu ray player :-)

What's a BluRay? ;)

I have not used an Xbox, but I vastly prefer our Roku to the others we have tried (Chromecast, Apple TV, Fire stick, 'Smart TV'). It's just so refreshingly neutral. We use several services (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Sirius XM, Pandora) and it has a nice top level search. It's UI is simple and uncluttered.

The ui is pretty easy, though definitely a little more geared towards the gaming side. I did end up buying their tv remote for it because it's not always intuitive using the gaming controllers

I liked my roku a lot for a while. The feature I bought it for though was the headphone jack in the remote, and I think they've ignored the remote users because most people use phone apps to control it, and as a result the remote just stopped working after an update.

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