Hi and hope all are well today. First, thanks in advance for any / all responses. Second, apologies if this isn’t the best place to ask this question.

I’m curious if anyone, has moved completely from using an AppleTV to something else. Current use case for the ATV is a few streaming apps (Crunchyroll / HiDive, Tubi, etc.) and Apple Arcade (a few casual games).

If you did completely switch, what did you decide on using? Did you go back to buying movies / using a DVD/Blu-Ray player, setup a mini PC and stream from websites / rip music and movies, use a gaming console instead, etc.?

Exploring options and entertaining thoughts for right now. Again, thanks and have a good day / evening.

Edit - 2024/01/01 - Just wanted to thank everyone for the lively discussion and resources (links, recommendations, etc.) related to my question.

  • @harsh3466English
    0•11 months ago

    @[email protected], yeah, I was being hyperbolic and overly dramatic in my previous comment.

    However, what is true in my experience (which I know is not everyone’s experience) is that:

    • The Roku software on my four year old tv is now unusable. It is slow, routinely locks up and freezes in playback and/or navigation, necessitating a replacement smart tv solution of some sort.

    • I thought that solution could be the Apple TV 4K I already have.

    • The Apple TV 4K has a number of software and hardware issues that make it unusable for me.

    Those issues include:

    • That touchpad remote. My butterfly keyboard mention is referring to the fact that Apple is well known for standing ground for years on their dumber hardware decisions. The touchpad remote was the default and only remote you could get for an Apple TV for six years (2015-2021). The butterfly keyboard was the only keyboard option on MacBooks for five years (2015-2020). The Magic Mouse with a charging port on the bottom is still the default Magic Mouse you get with a Mac. The Magic Mouse was also introduced in 2015 (going on nine years now).

    • The login issue I mentioned is the biggest software issue. Despite being logged in to my Apple/iCloud account in tvOS, it prompts me for a tvOS login roughly every five minutes. When I attempt to log in with the prompt (remember, I am already logged in) it tells me I can’t log in. I attempted to resolve this and gave up after 20 minutes of searching and troubleshooting. I pulled the plug because it shouldn’t take nearly half an hour to try to log in to software you’re already logged into.

    • As @[email protected] .net mentioned, The TV+ app is trying to be the hub for tv watching, which from a user perspective is confusing. tvOS is the hub, with the apps, and tvOS is still there. I think it’s safe to say that Apple would prefer all Apple TV+ users to use Apple hardware so Apple can have all the monies. With that in mind they probably designed the tv+ app to be its own hub (where within that app you can watch stuff from [insert streaming service]’s content without leaving the app) to try and poach TV+ subscribers on non Apple hardware. From the company’s perspective that makes sense. (Make people think all they need is Apple TV+, and hey, next streaming device we buy might as well be an Apple one.) That doesn’t make my user experience any better. For me at least, it makes it worse. I wanted the simplicity of tvOS as the only hub. (Editing to add that you do need to have the tv+ app installed if you’re a subscriber, which we were until recently.)

    • This is preference, and likely something I could have disabled had I gotten past the login issue, but I personally don’t like the bouncy, sticky, wiggly bits they added to tvOS and tv+ to accommodate the touchpad remote.

    Edit: also added comment attribution to chiisana.