>> but I have never had to worry about ads suddenly appearing after an update

The problem is that Android TV users used to think the exact same thing. It's even said in the reviews explicitly by some people. I don't and I won't trust a corporation, be it Apple or Google, to not do something in a future update - if it works fine right now then unfortunately that has to be good enough.

Not all companies are equal.

Some make money by selling things so they have an incentive to keep happy customers. Some companies don’t.

Of course. But companies change all the time - today Apple is very privacy focused and we can reasonably say they wouldn't do such a thing. Can you absolutely guarantee that they won't in 2 years? In 5? in 10? What if the CEO changes and they think that ad-derived value is the best thing ever?

Like, this isn't meant to be a post against Apple btw. Just that I don't see a point in saying "company X did a bad thing, that's why I buy company Y, they would never do this!" - they don't right now, that's what counts. But for the future? Who knows.

We have to make reasonable assumptions when making purchasing decisions. Just because something could happen does not make it a likely thing to happen and assuming that any company is equally likely to start serving advertisements on their devices is unreasonable and foolish.

While people may not have had the foresight to know that Google would be adding advertisements to their tv box, the behavior itself isn't unexpected given that Google is an advertising company. For Apple the behavior is both unexpected and disincentivized by the brand they've built for themselves.

I could die tomorrow but living my life under that impression would be foolish.

Apple subjects its users to entirely different type of abuse: purposeful incompatibility and vendor lock-in on every imaginable level from cable connectors to keyboard layouts. You always have to go all in to their ecosystem and pay a 50% premium on everything just for the Apple logo.

I guess it's a choice of if you want to bend over at the checkout or at home when you have started using the product.

> Apple subjects its users to entirely different type of abuse: purposeful incompatibility and vendor lock-in on every imaginable level from cable connectors to keyboard layouts.

By cable connectors I'm assuming you are mostly referring to the lightning connector, which came before USB-C was an option. I actually still think it's a better connector than USB-C, but the advantages of adopting USB-C at this point heavily outweigh the merits of keeping it. Still, Apple doesn't shy away from adopting new standards that it thinks it's better. They famously ditched their own serial connector (ADB) for USB in the iMac.

I have no clue what you meany by keyboard layout or how Apple in any way locks someone into a specific keyboard layout.

> You always have to go all in to their ecosystem

Why do you have to go all in on their ecosystem again? There are plenty of people with airpods or an iPad without any other Apple device and are perfectly happy with just that. Apple puts a lot of effort into creating an attractive ecosystem because their business is in selling hardware.

> pay a 50% premium on everything just for the Apple logo.

... And for the software, the ecosystem, the hardware, and a lot of other factors. I find it extremely weird that you say this in the same sentence that you mention the ecosystem. Beyond that, it's not even true? What devices cost 50% more when compared against comparable options from other manufacturers?

> I guess it's a choice of if you want to bend over at the checkout or at home when you have started using the product.

You're making of choice of paying for higher quality hardware that isn't subsidized or lower quality hardware that is. The biggest slap in the face here is for people that bought premium Android TV devices like the Nvidia Shield and still have to put up with this bullshit from Google.

The future is uncertain, that is life. But while a company is privacy focussed, reward that behaviour so they (or their new competitors for when they stop supporting privacy it) know people vote with wallets.

Of course I can’t guarantee it, no one can.

But it’s more likely if a company’s business model doesn’t involve ads vs does.

Past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, but it’s the best we got.

To paraphrase: "Some people commit crimes, there is nothing stopping other people committing crimes in the future; therefore everyone is a criminal."

U2.

I recently bought my first Apple TV after dumping our Virgin Media cable box. I still have an ancient 1080p LG smart TV that that the smart features are effectively unusable on. I’ll never buy a smart TV again if I can help it.

I’ve always used my PS4 for streaming services but the bloody thing was so loud. I’ve replaced the PS4 with a PS5 but it doesn’t have the national broadcaster’s crappy app and we wanted to keep access to these channels.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the Apple TV. It surfaces shows across my streaming apps without pushing TV+ in your face. It integrates beautifully with the Apple ecosystem, I can ask Siri on any device to play $show on Disney+ in the living room and it just works.

I’ve heard how bad the old remote was but the new one is really nice. I’ve paired my dualshock 4 controller to it for Apple Arcade and it works great.

The Apple TV is a device that doesn’t get much attention but I think it’s really impressive.

Yeah, Apple products have a reputation as “luxury” products, but the value is solid. For instance, with few exceptions, their phones receive updates for at least 6 years after release. Cheap android phones will be lucky to see 2 and even Samsung only does like 4 (and that’s recent… before it was 3). The iPhone 4S was updated for 93 months, almost 8 years.

I generally prefer more open ecosystems, but Apple has built a pretty strong reputation for not just being an ad company and for making solid products that are supported much longer than competitor devices.

Also all manufacturers which are not tracking Google's updates in a monthly interval are essentially worthless from a security perspective. Nobody needs to care about the latest Android version, which is only bringing marginal improvements amyway.

A correction - the article says Visio makes almost as much profits on ads and data ($38M) as hardware ($48M). In my view, the surprising thing here is how little money the hardware business makes. TVs are a low-margin product, so the revenues there are certainly higher. Visio sold 7 million TVs last year, and TVs last some years, so I’d estimate they have an install base of tens of millions and are making about $1 per TV per year in ads and data, which is obviously less than a TV costs. My takeaway is that this is a terrible business to be in, given that a leading brand is making so little per TV.

You can't really compare headline profits without seeing the full breakdown of revenue and expenses that led to those results.

For example Visio's hardware side could be reinvesting vast sums of revenue back into TV R&D. Or they could have invested in upstream component manufacturers. Maybe they spent a large amount on recruiting new staff. All those expenses are deducted before profit.

Meanwhile the ad division might have made no investments for the future and took the tax-inefficient choice to show a large profit instead.

Yeah sadly the Nvidia Shield is in the same ballpark when it comes down to the price. I have both an Apple TV 4K and an Nvidia Shield. I bought the shield when Apple had no 4K device as an alternative to get 4K HDR on Netflix. But I decided to shell out money again for an AppleTV 4K because they offered better support for HDR in movies and the general support to adopt features like Dolby Athmos is way faster on Apple. With Nvidia one had to be lucky to be in a partnership group as they were with the HDR adoption on Netflix. My PS4 was not able to play the content in HDR at the time since the Netflix app needed and update. It took nearly 6 more month.

I didn’t update the shield in quite some time as most new features are of no interest to me. And from the looks of it that won’t happen anytime soon. It’s worse enough that google did the same with the YouTube app …

I just realized that android tv and Nvidia shield experience are two different things. So it did and auto update. Bloody …

I hate to be that guy (no I don't) but this is why I just plugged one of the spare outputs on my PC into the TV with a 20ft HDMI extension cable and use a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to open movies from the living room.

That’s really a solo person solution. Anyone with a family in the house will need better, and anyone with family elsewhere can’t exactly recommend such a kludge without opening up a ton of support issues.

In that case just get a cheap computer (that's all these set top boxes are anyway) to keep in the living room.

So now I can’t use my computer when my kids watch tv?

Xorg supports multi headed setups. I don't personally do that since there are only two people in my house but you should be able to set it up pretty easily.

Can you sideload? Is there NewPipe? Pass. No ads but no choice. It solves one issue but creates another.

Yeah i agree, s-tube and newpipe are really great and you’d never get that on an apple tv.

Would’ve gone for an apple tv otherwise

Same. If Apple opened up their devices I'd switch everything over in a heartbeat.

I totally agree. I can't imagine paying the price of a premium laptop for a phone without newpipe.

Indeed. It's hard to sympathize with people upset about ads when they bought a platform made by an ad company. The outcome was obvious here.

This is pretty unsympathetic, and tacitly assumes that everyone has an understanding of the tech ecosystem.

The majority of people on the planet have phones running an OS made by the same ad company, and they'd be rightfully pissed if their home screens were suddenly was dominated by ads.

I bought a Sony TV, not a Google one. I would have expected Sony to disallow this somehow.

As far as I understand Googles Play Store comes with a viral license that forces preferential treatment for Google services on all Android devices made by a manufacturer unless they are sold in a country where that kind of anti competitive behavior is not tolerated. Basically Sonys choice is let Google rape its customers or kill all its Android based products over night.

I didn't realize nVidia was an ad company. Their business model sure has changed.

Apple products are luxury items for the vast majority of people in the world.

You know what else can give you a smooth, ad-free experience and freedom? Any cheap mini-pc with Kodi installed.

Yeah, but can it do that out-of-the-box with zero effort for the rest of my family? Sadly, no.

Futzing with Kodi updates, patches, updates to the OS, drivers, etc is all way too much to be considered ’smooth’ for most.

We've got a RPi running https://osmc.tv/ (based around Kodi) - other than pressing yes to install updates every so often it hasn't needed touching. There might even be an auto update at 1am type option.

It only gets used for local media + radio, twitch and youtube streams though - I don't know about other services.

Oh, yes, the old America's motto: "Give me convenience or give me death!"

Joking aside, there is not much futzing around to do if you just go with LibreElec, and you can even buy pre-installed boxes nowadays.

Does it support Full HD (at least) streaming from Netfilx and / or Prime?

My setup is like GP's, ie I play the videos on the computer, but what bothers me personally is that I have to boot windows to get the high quality streaming.

I've looked specifically at Kodi maybe a year ago and it didn't seem to support this. I'm OK with tinkering if I know it's actually possible to get this working.

The only service I subscribe to is njalla VPN, which I can then use to download any movie or TV show I want, in whatever quality I want and I get to keep it for as long as I want... can't get any smoother than that.

I'm not that big of a movie / tv show fan, I mostly watch while eating or when winding down for the day, so I rarely look for something specific. I'm very happy with Prime Video's offer, which is basically free for me, since I had already subscribed to Amazon Prime for regular shopping.

For my use, this is much less friction than any searching and waiting around for torrents or whatever to download.

There's also the discoverability factor. Not following current movies / shows, I don't necessarily know what shows exist. So browsing through random lists and then checking if they're available to download from enough people that it won't take a week is way too much work when all I want is to mindlessly watch something right now.

Kodi has add-ons (e.g Quasar or Elementum) that provide this ability to browse popular/new movie shows and lets you download a torrent and watch it as a stream. Your waiting time depends only on how many seeders are available, which means that popular files are basically instant.

Apple TV is ad free so long as you don’t count the un-dismissable 1p promos for Apple TV+ trials and Apple Arcade trials.

The Nvidia Shield Pro is more expensive than the Apple TV...

Unfortunately Apple TV remotes are a nightmare to use. The touch UX is an absolute pain.

On the Apple TV 2021 4K's remote you can disable the touch and just use the buttons, like I have done. Works a treat.

Use your phone as the remote. I agree the ones they ship are dreadful.

The new one is great - your complaint is an old one.

Yep. But can we expect everyone to spend $$$ to upgrade their Apple TV boxes for this or can we be allowed to complain a little when we bought the old device for Christmas last year?

PS: I don't actually complain :-) I'm a recent convert and compared to Chromecast I find Apple TV a massive upgrade.

Just use the TV remote and hdmi cec.

The 2nd generation Siri remote adds click support back in again.

Yea I have Apple everything except for this one Shield Pro because the audio quality (esp Atmos) is clearly better than AppleTV. Even my wife who really doesn’t care about audio notices.

Apple TV shows Apple TV+ ads on the homescreen. The big difference is that Android TV lets you replace the launcher entirely, while Apple TV leaves you to Apple's whims.