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Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

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Ridiculed by whom? We've seen many competitors try to make a streaming service and beyond Apple, they all provide a laggy experience even in the menus.

If you're going to emulate someone, it's not a bad idea to emulate who has the best results

Even Apple TV is pretty sluggish on my LG TV. And it sometimes makes my TV crash so I have to reboot it. It's maybe not as bad as the steaming pile of garbage that is Sky-Showtime, but it's got a ways to go before it's comparable to Netflix on my TV. Amazon Prime is pretty terrible on my TV too.

That’s your TV having a shitty processor and WebOS not being the best. Even expensive smart TVs don’t ship with good silicon.

Get something like an Apple TV or Fire TV Cube and you’ll have a better experience. The Apple TV 4K in particular ships with a very powerful processor, it’s far snappier than any other streaming box I’ve tried.

It's been a few years since I let go of my TV, a not new-at-the time, but high-end LG, and I loved WebOS on it. I considered it the best, even better than Apple TV, especially for netflix. The new owner runs it without complaints.

Yeah, no shit. Still, Netflix, Plex and Youtube work just fine, so Apple TV should be able to work at least as well. I'm not buying an extra device just to compensate for shitty software, that's silly. I prefer to unsubscribe.

These services aren't run by a company that primarily sells hardware/devices. See iTunes on Windows.

> I'm not buying an extra device just to compensate for shitty software, that's silly

Serious question: Then why did you buy an Apple TV? This is Apple's entire MO. You are expected to replace all your devices every year or two.

> This is Apple's entire MO. You are expected to replace all your devices every year or two.

As someone who previously was an "anti-fan" of Apple's (we're talking 2000s, early 2010s) for their ridiculous prices (and that still stands for things like the Vision Pro), I've now seen the light (or gone to the dark side if you prefer) and now believe Apple provides better value for money than most of their competition due to the longevity of their devices. I know this is anecdotal and a sample size of one but I'd be curious to see data backing up your claim above.

Apple was a rip off luxury brand back in the day if you had a Samsung Fascinate or something. MacBooks were horrible and macOS was annoying to deal with. Now they're the default price/performance choice if you want a decent reliable machine, and iPhones are obviously very good value if you just want a phone that works for as long as possible.

Can attest to this, typing this on a 6 year old iphone 8 plus

Yes, that must be why they abandon older hardware and don’t support it long term unlike Android based boxes and built in hardware…

I'm talking about the Apple TV streaming service, not the device.

Maybe for their other product lines, but not the Apple TV. It’s infrequently updated and they easily last 5 years or more.

Laggy menus typically have little or nothing to do with microservice architectures.

Incorrect. Frequently, UI lag on components that hit server side back services is made significantly worse by naïve microservices, especially in the face of organic growth.

Specifically, every API call that traverses a machine, boundary, necessarily impart, additional latency, and uncontrolled microservices can have a multiplicative effect

I agree that a bad implementation may lead to poor performance. However, this is irrespective of the architecture. The effects of an architecture are more noticeable in the context of maintainability, scalability, and extensibility.

Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment?

it's not actually irrespective of architecture. Some architectures are significantly more prone to certain kinds of problems than others. For example, monoliths can become so large as to make development, especially many-team development, inconvenient or impossible. In the specific case of microservices, the key benefit (multiple teams can develop and deliver in parallel without stepping on each other, separating concerns into their own ownership areas) has the tradeoff of distributed systems overhead, which can range from high latency (when a number of microservices are in a serialized hot path and the complexity is not being effectively managed) to lowered availability or consistency (when data is radiating through a network of microservices asynchronously and different services 'see' different data and make conflicting correct decisions). Monoliths see this set of performance problems much, much later in their lifecycle, because they have much better data locality and local function call characteristics.

Anything that is front-facing a UI or API typically has a response cache.

More so for something like a web app like AppleTV where the content is largely static.

There should be zero difference in performance between microservices and monolith in this scenario.

Incorrect. Many calls, such as to auth, identity, ad service, metrics, etc., cannot be cached.

Ad serving and metrics are asynchronous so won't block any UI. And authentication/identity has the same behaviour with monolith/microservices. It's ultimately just a look up this user in some database.

It's the serving of the content that requires coordination across multiple services and most of that should be cached at the serving layer.

Incorrect, in most apps nontrivial content is highly personalized and dynamically served, auth in microservices is frequently two or more hop rather than one hop, and ad serving and metrics frequently involve synchronous steps.

And yet if you can't even implement a smooth scroll of 2D images over a backdrop in 2024, why would I listen to your opinion of microservices?

Disney owned streaming services and HBO Max are far from laggy thanks to BamTech.

But as far as the menus being laggy. When you are trying to keep the bill of materials for streaming to less than $20 in the case of Roku, what do you expect?

The AppleTV box is $140 and the difference in quality shows

It's incredible how poor of an experience Apple TV Plus is on web browsers, even on Safari.

the circumstances when microservices make sense are pretty well documented, but of course it's not widely known, especially because it doesn't fit into the 'microservices are future' slogan.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/microservices-netflix-in...

Pretty sure OP was sarcastic, lots of people blindly copy big corporation tech even if they don't have big corporation problems and scale.

Bullseye

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