Okay I have to cry uncle. I had an Apple TV A8 before 2017. In 2016, I began shifting away from Apple to become platform agnostic. In the last year I began coming back to Apple because using non Apple devices left me wishing everyone else would make things as well as Apple did.
When I bought my 4K TV in 2017, I bought a Roku Streaming Stick + to go with it. It was great until the 9.0 software update when it became buggy and unusable (video/audio coming out of sync and severe interface lagginess). I got fed up and replaced it with a Chromecast with Google TV when those came out. Less than a year later, it has become unusable due to the paltry 4 GB of storage and Android’s heinous caching mechanism. I had nothing irregular installed — just my streaming service apps — which you would think wouldn’t take up a load of space since they’re streaming. Well, no. They cached so much data I would get errors trying to launch my apps saying the app needed an update. And when I’d go to update the app I would get another error saying there was not enough space to update the app itself. So in other words, nothing was updating and I was none the wiser until it wouldn’t run. And how do you fix this kind of situation besides clearing cache app by app? Uninstall one of the eight apps you had installed until the one you want is able to update. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So I gave in and went back to an Apple TV 4K (A12). Both of us in our house have commented not just on how much more clean the UI is but also how we didn’t realize how crummy the video and audio quality was on the Chromecast (its been too long since I used the Roku to offer a fair comparison). The Apple TV has offered crisper audio and video and the iPhone based color calibration seems to have enhanced the picture quality slightly (color range particularly) on our TV.
So I call uncle and admit it. $179 seemed outrageous for a streaming box. But when everything cheaper is compromising the video and audio quality and won’t update after installing just a few apps, well, I own it. You get what you pay for.
You win, Apple. You win.
When I bought my 4K TV in 2017, I bought a Roku Streaming Stick + to go with it. It was great until the 9.0 software update when it became buggy and unusable (video/audio coming out of sync and severe interface lagginess). I got fed up and replaced it with a Chromecast with Google TV when those came out. Less than a year later, it has become unusable due to the paltry 4 GB of storage and Android’s heinous caching mechanism. I had nothing irregular installed — just my streaming service apps — which you would think wouldn’t take up a load of space since they’re streaming. Well, no. They cached so much data I would get errors trying to launch my apps saying the app needed an update. And when I’d go to update the app I would get another error saying there was not enough space to update the app itself. So in other words, nothing was updating and I was none the wiser until it wouldn’t run. And how do you fix this kind of situation besides clearing cache app by app? Uninstall one of the eight apps you had installed until the one you want is able to update. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So I gave in and went back to an Apple TV 4K (A12). Both of us in our house have commented not just on how much more clean the UI is but also how we didn’t realize how crummy the video and audio quality was on the Chromecast (its been too long since I used the Roku to offer a fair comparison). The Apple TV has offered crisper audio and video and the iPhone based color calibration seems to have enhanced the picture quality slightly (color range particularly) on our TV.
So I call uncle and admit it. $179 seemed outrageous for a streaming box. But when everything cheaper is compromising the video and audio quality and won’t update after installing just a few apps, well, I own it. You get what you pay for.
You win, Apple. You win.
