It's so much better than the "Smart" Samsung TV it is plugged into that it's not even funny.
The remote control has touch. I can use my phone to type text input. It's fast. It's elegant and slick. It has no ads. It has options that I care about. It doesn't waste my time with options I don't care about.
The Samsung TV on the other hand was a flagship model. Top of the line. Best of the best. Just a few years ago.
Now? It is unusable. It is beyond slow. Two to three second response time. Text input is just torture. Netflix crashes. YouTube mangles HDR in some weird way that makes people look like they were drawn by a kid with crayons.
It's shocking to me that you can pay thousands of dollars to Samsung and have them destroy your investment with "updates", whereas you can pay a few hundred dollars to Apple and have a slick product that improves over time.
What I don't understand is the executives at other companies. Companies that aren't the #1 biggest in the world. How do they not get it!? Just copy Apple! Stop fucking over your customers, and maybe they'll give you more money! I know I give Apple more money every year!
It's not that hard. It really isn't.
>Support for the Ambient mode Headlines Service is scheduled to end on September 30, 2020. We thank you for using the service and we look forward to providing an improved alternative in the near future
I'm not going to buy a new TV every year. "Smart" features that are discontinued after ~1 year are worse than worthless, it's just clutter in the menus at this point.
Also crazy are hardcoded "Netflix", "Rakuten" and "Amazon" buttons on the Samsung remote, you just know that they will stop working at some point.
Now you could argue as to whether you want Netflix preinstalled on your TV, but while most smart features of smart TVs are useless, having Netflix is useful for many users.
Text input.
All the letters lined alphabetically with only left-right movement allowed. Takes ages to input anything. Also no corrections allowed. I actually exit appleTV and use the built in TV apps for when I need youtube and the like, because their input mechanism is not insane.
I know there is a remote app for iPhones, but you do provide an actual remote, make it work ffs.
(Even so, what you describe still happens on occasion for me, but it helps)
If they had a 2D text input they wouldn't be able to do momentum in swiping as well as horizontal (side effect of the horrible remote), but more importantly, the primary text input on Apple TV is voice, in the moment just hold the Siri button. It takes in letters over voice too. Worlds faster than any other input on tv. No wonder they prioritized on it.
The last glyph in the row of letters is the delete key.
But what if I need to input a language that's not supported or I just don't want to yell at my TV to search a video?
I have a bunch of aTVs, and while they’re the best boxes I’ve used, there’s definitely some ads baked in, and in prominent placements.
- The TV app started out as a directory + recommendation engine for services you had “connected” to the app; it’s turned into a series of pitches for Apple TV+ and Apple’s “Channels” feature. These placements are below-the-fold, but the default behavior has the “TV” button on the remote bring up that app (although you can change this to display the home screen). - In the top banner, the TV & Music apps will (by default) auto-play trailers and music videos (on mute). You can disable that behavior for the TV app, and it’ll revert to displaying your watch queue.
No one uses the trackpad on their playstation controllers, why did apple run with the same idea?
I'm a big fan of the Roku boxes.
I found the support article from Sony on this:
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00225587
If this is a TV that is used by very young children, ads with blood splatter as shown in their example seem pretty tasteless.
Google's page on the introduction of ads has the same thing - an ad for Sesame Street followed up with the ad containing blood splatter.
https://blog.google/products/android-tv/find-new-faves-faste...
> A3: No, the suggestions cannot be removed.
I keep hoping someone will file a class action over this. These dumbfuck ads just appeared one day on my Bravia X900E, about a year after purchase. I didn't opt in to this and I wouldn't have bought the damn thing if this "feature" existed at the time. Sign me up for the class!
Honestly, that's the thing I hate most about the Fire Stick, and why I don't use it's discovery feature at all... I don't want to see promotions for 4,000 services I don't subscribe to. Sure, if I search for a specific show, I don't mind results from those services ... but as general adverts for shows? No thank you.
- Remove the “TV” app from the top bar. - You can change the behavior from the “Settings” app to show your “TV” app’s watch queue instead of trailers.
You can’t disable the Music app videos, though.
Unless you mean trailers for whatever the cursor is on, inside of an app like Netflix? If so, some of those can be disabled, but I actually like them—they're "ads" for content that I already have access to but may not have known about otherwise.
Also great solution for cheap subsidized TVs where they are banking on your connecting to your network so only charge $100.
Plug in an apple TV and you are set.
https://tidbits.com/2020/01/16/why-is-the-apple-tv-constantl...
Disabling them is also fairly easy, and if you don't use the TV app, they go away entirely.
Smart TV manufacturers are relying on the ongoing revenue from their software side nowadays, so they’ll usually mandate setting up an internet connection as part of the device setup process, and then only give you the option to change networks instead of disabling it outright.
If you’re tech savvy, you can take measures against this, but it’s not going to be simple for most folks.
You also have to worry about ethernet-over-HDMI unintentionally exposing the TV to the wider internet.
I ended up with an AppleTV. So far, if it plays on my phone, it will play on the TV, too.
