Hacker News Reader

Comment by PlutoIsAPlanet | Hacker News Reader

Nah, most Android TV sticks and boxes (bar Nvidia) ship with underpowered chipsets that lack the raw performance to render smoothly at 4K, using HW acceleration to at least get acceptable video decode performance.

Apple, being in control of the software and hardware, has better optimisation, as well as imho, a more fluid animation system on their OS.

View on HN

The stick and dongle streaming device variants in particular are astonishingly weak. The current Chromecast 4K dongle for example is handily outgunned by a first gen Apple TV 4K, which this year will be a 7 year old device.

Wow, thanks for pointing that out - didn't realize I'd had these ATV 4Ks since 2017. They feel a bit sluggish.. probably just that everything else got faster.

Time to upgrade.

> They feel a bit sluggish.. probably just that everything else got faster.

Either the 4K videos of today are "heavier" than the ones from 2017 somehow, or Apple's system updates have slowed down your ATVs to convince you to buy new ones.

On this I will say they are far more snappy than they used to be, battery life is great if you ask me.

But in real terms I moved my home streaming app of choice to infuse. Between that app and the Apple TV 4K I’ve had since just before they moved the remote to usb c it’s been great.

I will say that it is tucked inside a cupboard and hooked up to Ethernet but aside from that it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the other solutions I looked at /tried over the last few years.

I had both an Android TV device some years back, and am now exclusively on Apple TV. Man. The difference is night and day. I'm not going back.

True but both the Nvidia and Apple offerings are kinda long in the tooth now and in need of an update.

It's rumoured that a new apple TV will come out soon. I've been looking at the options because I'm getting sick of the many ads on my fire TV stick.

I only have a 1080p TV so the rendering isn't really an issue for me.

The latest Apple TV SoC (released in late 2021) is the same one used in the iPhone 13 and 14 (non-Pro). 2x 3+ GHz P-cores and 4x E-cores and 4GB of memory. I haven’t noticed any issues.

https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/T8110

Yeah but if I spend that much money (not sure about the US but here in Europe it's really expensive, 170 or 190 euro) I really want something recent :) for longevity also. It will have to last a good few years after all. 3 years in for the same price is just not a great deal. It's still a 3 year old cpu (I don't use iOS so I don't really follow what's SoC generation is what)

So I'll wait for the next version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com