Should You Buy the New Apple TV 4K?

Originally published at: Should You Buy the New Apple TV 4K? - TidBITS

The Apple TV has received its first hardware update in years, but is it worth an upgrade? Do you even need an Apple TV anymore?

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I bought a new Samsung TV to get the various apps on it and disconnect the Apple TV. This was mainly to reduce remote clutter and to make it easier for my wife to navigate. This lasted about a week before the Apple TV was plugged back in.
The great advantage that the Apple TV and the Apple TV app on it have is that the various services are linked and you can search across them. The one hold out is Netflix. You can’t do this using the apps on a smart TV.

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Yaaaaas. So lame! It has so much potential as a true dashboard that it has completely abdicated!

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Joe Rosensteel has a piece about the new Apple TV 4K that echoes much of what Josh said:

I have an Apple TV HD. I don’t need the speed and I have no plans of replacing my Panasonic plasma TV any time soon, so no 4K. But you know what I would like. A 1 gig port instead of the 100baseT port. I finally have an Internet connection that is faster than 100Mbps so it would be nice to have the additional speed available for streaming. But glitches are rare so I’m not going to buy.

Engadget reports that Vizio makes as much money from your data as it does from TVs.

BTW, Vizio is a profoundly creepy company. I once called them for support. They looked up a file on me (how did they even have one?), and asked me how Tony was doing. That was my dad’s name and he died in 1999. Needless to say, the conversation went downhill from there.

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Like the mail to my father and mother that still follows me around, it may just reflect the fact that we once shared an address: try looking yourself up on Spokeo.com, for instance. Creepy.