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Comment by mr_mitm | Hacker News Reader

What do you think of Nvidia Shield? I haven't tried it, but I think it should also belong to 2). It's clearly much more expensive than a FireTV, but as you say it shouldn't be subsidized by ads. As an Android device it should be more open than an Apple TV. While I recognize the near flawless UI and high hardware quality of most Apple devices, I disagree with their "golden cage" or walled garden approach.

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I see many people liking their shield, and with good reason it seems, but is it a worthy ecosystem to buy in to when it has not seen a new hardware revision since 2019?

What benefits would a hardware upgrade bring the end user? Not releasing a new model every year sounds like a perfectly good thing to me as long as they keep updating the software without introducing performance problems.

My biggest gripe with the Shield is the newest one has a remote that I really don’t like. Luckily it can be replaced with a third party remote!

I too think yearly updates are a bit too much and I too want to keep my devices for a long time. Still rocking an iPhone 12 (mini).

But support for newer codecs like AV1 and general hardware refreshes to keep up with the underlying Android base would still seem like good ideas to me.

Reading the specs it seems that the Shield also would benefit from being able to detect frame rate to auto-switch via HDMI.

Higher network bandwidth to play UHD Blu-ray rips seems like something people want.

Same, one of mine is from the initial models, and still working and receiving updates... it doesn't have the 4k upscaling of the newer models, but I've been happy and have several in my house.

About half my watching is YouTube on a paid account, the other half via Kodi and the high seas. My SO uses the regular apps for Netflix, Amazon and HBO currently. Having support for hacker-friendly features as well as blessed apps with 4k support has been pretty great.

As another post mentioned, the remote (current and previous) have been less than stellar... I've been using the one linked below[1], which works pretty well, though uses a USB dongle. FWIW, can also pair a bluetooth headset if you want the big screen experience, but don't want to blow out the house with audio sometimes.

1. https://amazon.com/dp/B07RFN8Z47

I have that exact remote. It's fantastic.

This. The lack of a Shield hardware refresh seems insane.

I get Nvidia (the company) has other priorities with higher revenue.

But they have a product, with proven product-market fit, that gives them a last mile connection with end users, in one of the highest utilization home spaces.

How has no one at Nvidia looked at that and said "I'm not saying we orient our entire focus around it, but shouldn't we at least fund it as a strategic priority?"

If datacenter revenue falls off, it's going to look awfully short-sighted not to have diversified customer base when they had the chance.

The Shield Pro is perfect for me and I have no reason to upgrade. Have mine downgraded and de-bloated using this guide [0] running a custom launcher. Like you said being Android and more open helps a lot.

[0] https://florisse.nl/shield-debloat/

Wow, forced ai translation based on.. ip? System lang?

Does this article actually expect the reader to download two random APK files and then install them on their Shield? This seems... dangerous?

I've had the same Shield for about 8 years and it's still going strong, has all the hardware decoding I need

Even on the OG hardware, I'm able to use 4K in h.265 or AV1 without issue, it does get hot though.

I use the non-Pro version for 1080p streaming and have for years. It’s great, does what I want and gets out of the way. Some years ago they were forced by Google to use the standard AndroidTV UI instead of their own custom one, which means it now shows ads on the home screen (a carousel of “watch this on service X”), which are inoffensive enough I haven’t bothered to circumvent them. You can swap to your own custom UI if you want with some ssh futzing.

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