I turn on the device, the app in the upper left is selected and showing some content from that.
The device sits idle, I get drone footage of landscapes.
If I accidentally bump the wrong button on the remote and get sent into the Apple TV (streaming service) app, sure it advertises producte, but in general there are no ads.
In comparison, Google TV's homescreen is giant ads for content on services I don't subscribe to, Roku is at least as bad, Amazon is worse, and Samsung and LG......oof.
App-only mode on android tv has a giant ad banner before the apps icons. It's much better than regular mode, but it's still a giant ad. It's been the case on all my Android TV devices. If you don't see it then I guess it must be disabled in some regions?
The shield is vastly superior to the Apple TV. You aren't trapped in Apples wall garden and can install any apps on it. Android TV comes with an awful launcher, but that is easily replaced. There's no sponsor block on Apple TV and there never will be.
No, it's not. Let's start with the disclaimer that I work for Google, not the Android TV team, all words my own, etc.
The Shield at launch was an amazing product - premium UX and hardware, premium price point. Google changed the experience to an ad-loaded mess without providing an opt out for those who had spent hundreds of dollars on the Shield.
I was dogfooder, a huge advocate of the product, and someone who had convinced others to buy the Shield and Android TV devices. That UX revamp and how the team treated their customers (internal and external) turned me off the product for life. I tried the various competitors (XBox, Roku, Amazon) before landing on Apple TV. I now own two Apple TV devices - both of which are still getting updates many years after I bought them - and will continue using them for as long as the product line is maintained.
People in this thread have talked about Apple's clean beautiful ad-free UX, but the apps themselves are far better. Apple sets customer-friendly App Store requirements *and enforces them*. That means:
* The back button always works. It will bring you back to the home page of the app and then to the system launcher. It will not get stuck in an endless loop of "are you sure you want to quit?" and just dismissing that dialog like multiple Android apps do
* No loud obtrusive sounds on app startup (YouTube, Netflix)
* The apps are first-class priorities for developers. Circa 2019, the Paramount+ app was an inconsistent mess where subtitles were broken on some platforms. The Plex app wouldn't transcode certain formats on the XBox, and so on. None of these issues are a problem on Apple TV. Not every app is perfect (Dropout, I love your content, but your app is awful), but none of them are worse than on any competing platform.
Apple TV is a truly incredible product and ecosystem and one that feels like a joy to use. That's not the case for Android TV (now Google TV, I think?) even with a custom launcher.
Perplexity Launcher is free and takes <2 minutes to install on the Shield or other Google TV devices and has zero ads. Being able to sideload apps that will never be allowed on the Apple TV is a major benefit for anything piracy adjacent.
I (and most users) don't care about that. Having a great app for YouTube and other services I use is far more important than being able to stream pirated content.
You can also use the VLC app on an Apple TV to have a free and slightly janky media server. Just drag and drop files through any browser on a computer.
Eh, you'd have to pay me to use anything from Analogue.
ModRetro put their effort where it matters[0], whereas Analogue aren't even honest about their hardware, with baseless claims of 100% compatibility, recurring shipping delays or screwing preorders out of picking case shells. Which can't even be readily replaced.
I don’t think the author meant it as an insult to Poland.
Apple is unusually centralized (they don’t even have different business units; the company has a single balance sheet at P&L) and corporate level decision making is pretty much all done by the same small team at the mother ship.
So while all sorts of decisions are made locally, a hire outside Cupertino (which all of Poland happens to be) is extremely unlikely to signal a corporate shift.
Even a job ad for a role in Los Angeles would be equally unlikely to signal such a shift.
It's a long way from their headquarters, a massive time zone difference at least. I don't think they're working on something that needs the direct attention of leadership.
It is in Ireland for tax reasons tho... like you understand this is how corporations make concessions with government right? You get favorable terms if you provide jobs/tax revenue? 6,000 employee salaries is a drop in the bucket for a company skirting 10s to 100s of billions in tax revenue.
It was unanimously downvoted and attracted community flags, which is why I saw it. Others found a way to respond with substance, whereas your response seemed like snark. I can understand you didn't mean it to be seen as a low-quality comment; few people do. But I'm bringing to your attention the fact that I, and others in the community, read it as the kind of comment that we don’t want to see here.
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