Lots of users want simplicity on their TVs, not power. The Apple TV is easier to set up and use than a PC. (When I looked a number of years ago, it was also quieter and drew less power, but PCs have probably caught up.) The experience of using a keyboard and mouse is also awful from a couch without weird trays or additional furniture. A $150 Apple TV is also cheaper than a $200 PC + keyboard + mouse.

For an appliance that plays YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, streaming music, media from an iTunes library, and can stream audio and video from your phone and computer, the Apple TV works pretty dang well.

That said, I have a fourth generation Apple TV after previously having owned a third gen. The fourth gen has a lot of potential, but has not yet pushed TV forward. I've used the App Store mostly to get new sources of audio and video to stream. I haven't yet found any killer app interactive experiences that are more compelling than they would be on other screens. Maybe that will end up being games, but it will probably be something nobody's thought of. (Personally, I really hope, maybe Apple, figures out a great web browsing UX for the TV, but I'm not counting on it.)

Also, it's really nice (now that Hulu+ has finally allowed us to "cut the cord") that everything is on one (simple) remote now, with no input switching. The only thing we use the Harmony Hub remote for anymore is turning the whole system on/off (my Receiver doesn't seem to do the HDMI control pass-through), or switching to the PS4 or WiiU.

The "stick" devices are nice in their own way. But having a physical remote and a single "all you can eat" device really adds to the simplicity IMO.

It's not so much that it uses the phone as a "remote", since you're browsing the content you want to play directly on the phone. It basically moves all browsing to the device, which they're pretty good at, and leaves just display to the chromecast. I usually prefer it to clicking around on-screen with a hardware remote now.

It's the same reason the WiiU app navigation is a big minus for me. I don't ever want to see that Mii lobby thing. Don't know what the hell it's for. Just put the apps on the TV like every other console. Mirror on the gamepad if you want. That's fine. But don't try to force it as the default option to the exclusion of the rest of the party. (Yes I realize you can "cast" it up to the TV, but is it sticky? I don't know, because it still seems to routinely annoy by going back to the gamepad.)

Anyways, yes, the Chromecast has it's place. And it's a nice fall-back when the AppleTV in the conference room is unreliable because you've got a dozen of them around the office, 3 different WiFi networks nobody knows which to be on, and the AppleTV disconnects every five minutes while your laptop doesn't realize and getting reconnected takes a minute or two and ugh it's just so frustrating... Never have that problem at home.

Different devices for different markets.

That said, $150 for an AppleTV is a bit more dear than the old $99 pricepoint. It's a harder sell than it used to be.

I like my AppleTV4, but it doesn't really do much that my 3 didn't do. I tried using the Plex app, hoping it would replace the HTPC that I finally junked and replaced with a TiVo. Sadly, my NAS is not powerful enough to transcode, so I'm back at square one.. except, with the TiVo, now I have 6 devices and only 5 HDMI ports on my receiver.. back to square one.

Instead of running something on the computer or NAS to transcode, you could try using the free VLC app on the Apple TV to access your NAS (although it currently doesn't support AC3 audio and will in a later release). You could also buy the Infuse Pro app on the store, which plays all video and audio formats (including licensed ones) from any available network share. In both these cases, the decoding/transcoding happens on the Apple TV.

Its by far the best media streamer experience I've had so far.

For instance on setup I entered the same apple account password more than 4 times despite having synced from my phone... I then had to enter it every time I wanted to purchase something despite checking the setting that did not require a password for purchases. Entering my long-ass password on that tiny apple remote is really frustrating. It doesn't have Amazon prime video -- voice search for apps, or really anything that makes it better than my xbox one. I can't upload my own videos to it to play or play from a network stream.

I can say "xbox watch HBO" and suddenly it switches from my game to my cable box and tunes to the correct channel. "xbox open netflix" and suddenly I'm on netflix.

Of course microsoft just redesigned the entire interface for the xbox and now that sucks too...

For all it's flaws (and there are many) that kind of integration is really really neat.

Xbox One was supposed to be the culmination of the vision. Too bad Microsoft alienated their audience (gamers), by mixing messages and designing their whole interface around a hardware fad, the Kinnect. Didn't help that they also alienated so many independent developers and which left them with a dearth of software as well.

Most people don't want to plug a desktop into their TV and use a keyboard and mouse to watch Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Video. It's a TV, you want to use a remote, and a user interface that has been designed for a remote.

The Apple TV isn't competing with low-end HTPCs, it's competing with the Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, and other plug-and-play media devices.

An example is a DVR I encountered. The "smart" part of the interface takes ~30 seconds to activate, loads icons from a remote server somewhere (how long will that stay up?) and appears to run on some unholy mashup of HTML and an old version of Flash. Don't even get me started on the UX.

Apple's coming in with previous experience of TV interfaces, a slick design team and a software team who actually prioritise performance. And I'm no Apple fan.

I've worked for a number of consumer electronics hardware manufacturing companies. For all of them, software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software. Their business is turning raw physical materials into physical widgets, stuffing those widgets into plastic packaging, putting them on trucks, and shipping them off somewhere. Almost universally, the software produced by these companies is crap.

For whatever reason, most hardware companies just don't grok software. They see it as just another cost of manufacturing--a line item on the BOM just like screws and sheet metal. In order to move these widgets onto store shelves, we need to source these parts, assemble them with these steps, test the electronics like so, environmental, stress, UL testing and, oh, by the way, we need to spoon in some of this software stuff or nothing shows up on the screen, but keep it cheap! It's almost seen as a nuisance, a necessary evil: Just slap something together so we can get on with our real business of shipping widgets. Go to leadership in one of these companies and start talking about software best practices. User experience, A/B testing, unit testing, re-usable code, refactoring, hell--source control! They'll look at you like you're wearing a horse head mask. Software is just not a priority--it is seen as an unfortunate cost, not as a differentiator.

So, yea, when a software company (not just Apple, anyone who fundamentally gets software) enters their market with their own product, expect it to be light years ahead.

The funny thing is that this perfectly describes Apple.

This is how software is seen in all sectors whose main line of business isn't shipping software.

Just a little bit. The fluid UI, iOS foundation, app store and federated search means it's automatically a superior product to competitors such as Roku or Fire TV.

And it is a very nice package. It's very smooth. Apps like Plex and Netflix are a bit rough, but now they have a good foundation to build on, and the app store will change the amount of competition in this space - already there are three competing Plex clients, for example.

I was in the same boat, by the way: I bought the 2nd gen AppleTV, tried to like the 3rd gen, but it was slow and generally terrible. Same with competing products. I bought them and ended up not using them. The new AppleTV I'm actually using. It helps that I have it hooked up to Plex. Unlike the old Plex client you could install into a jailbroken 2nd/3rd-gen AppleTV, is actually very usable.

The Apple TV is imho far superior. I don't have worry about the machine being turned off. I don't have to use a clunky mouse and keyboard to get to the right app to watch a show. The Apple TV "just works" for watching movies, shows, trailers, youtube etc.

Could it be better yes. Having a keyboard occasionally for searching would be great, the UI is sometimes a bit confusing, and I hit frustrating bugs. Overall though a dedicated device plugged into the TV beats a generic computer, it even beats my PS4.

hopefully some password managers will port their apps over. My passwords aren't easy to type with the remote.

But at the end of the day for 90% of what I want to watch, movies and tv from iTunes, netflix, and hbo the Apple TV does it in a much less klunky way. There is almost no maintenance, no patching, no installing drivers, it works.

1. Plex (for local streaming of .. eh.. videos from my desktop computer)

2. Netflix.

3. Youtube.

Pretty much the rest of the apps are quite weak.

I really love the way it uses HDMI-CEC to wake up the tv from sleep, and also includes an IR volume control for my receiver. I think this alone caused me to not watch any regular cable tv for like two months, because I would have to use more than one remote control to do so. :)

2. "Besides Netflix and YouTube I barely use it." What fraction of video minutes do those two represent?

3. The tvOS ecosystem is new, give it time. Apple has the clout to build it out (vs Amazon, Samsung, etc.).

And I am very confused what desktop setup you are getting for $149 that is going to be as polished, seamless and easy to use as the AppleTV. Remember the market here isn't geeks it's parents, children and people who don't want a huge, ugly black box sitting next to their shiny new 80inch TV. They don't want another computer to backup, update, check for viruses, install drivers for etc.

The consoles obviously cost more than $150, but provide the same services.

I got a Amazon FireTV Stick for my MiL. It seems like a nice device. The interface is really decent, though it pushes Amazon Videos harder than the AppleTV pushes iTunes I feel like. Netflix and Hulu on the latest AppleTV feel "first class" for example. Same number of steps as getting to iTunes content (or one extra if you have multiple Netflix profiles). And the search is universal. Whereas on FireTV the Netflix App is kinda off in a corner and most of the content you're presented on startup is inaccessible if you don't have a Prime account.

Anyways, hardware wise, the latest AppleTV feels more powerful/capable than most devices on that list. Not sure about the PS3 or 360 or original Wii since I didn't really use them as media devices, but it's definitely much more powerful than the WiiU (I've tried Netflix and Hulu on it for the kids and it's nowhere near as snappy or responsive).

Anyways, yes, the PS4 (I don't have an XBone yet) does most of what the latest AppleTV does. But it's less focused and more cumbersome. No voice search for example. The apps seem a bit slower. (Except for Youtube, which is far better than the crippled version made for TvOS.)

Not sure where I'm going with all this except to say the latest AppleTV has it's own strengths/weaknesses and is more of a media-device++ than a Console--.

My own pro/cons would be:

Pro: Boots way faster than the previous version. Just a few seconds. Con: Needs to be rebooted every other day or so when apps can no longer play video for unknown reasons.

Pro: Board games on the AppleTV with a young family are awesome. Con: Not enough of them.

Pro: Plenty of age-appropriate games for children. Crossy Road is one of the few games my 3yo and 7yo can really play well together, and the TV experience is great. Con: Not enough more in-depth games. Where's Kingdom Rush?!?

Con: The on-screen Keyboard is the worst ever designed in the history of on-screen keyboards. W.T.F. Apple. Seriously. Especially painful in Youtube since you can't voice-search there.

Pro: The optional Controller is great. Con: It's not used to it's fullest since most buttons map to things that'll kick you out of the current app.

I totally get not making the 3rd party controller required. But it's a rough compromise to be limited to NES level controls.

1: WTF, Netflix, why would you remove proper Kinect support from the Xbox One app?

I swear the Netflix app on Xbox is somehow being released in reverse order. Every single time it updates, features are ripped out.

Try looking for genres and separating tv shows from movies in Netflix on any of those platforms if you don't know what we are talking about.

I actually quite like the youtube.com/tv page as a good demonstration of a HTML5 app, though it has some navigation quirks. Before the Apple TV I had a NUC set up with Kodi and Chrome Launcher for when I wanted to use YouTube and I'd use the TV page exclusively.

Here's the Geekbench benchmark: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/4955785?ba...

Basically the A8 uses less power and is much faster in almost every case. It has a ton more fill-rate as well, which means short of a console, it's probably the most powerful setup graphically by a good margin currently.

They have the same amount of RAM.

I'm a fan of Amazon Video. I think in most ways their app interfaces generally beat Apple's. They appear to incrementally improve routinely where you're probably lucky to get a significant AppleTV interface improvement once a year (I don't hold out much hope for Apple fixing the keyboard, and I don't consider the recent Bluetooth keyboard support addition much improvement).

Anyways, the Qualcomm/nVidia vs Apple Ax series seems very much like AMD vs Intel to me. For a casual observer like myself, the Apple processors seem to pretty much always be the most energy efficient, and provide significantly more performance at the same time. So if cores and clock speed are the most important thing to you, you buy the Qualcomm or AMD (well, not cores so much, but work with me) CPU. But if you want the best performance with the most efficiency, you buy the Apple or Intel solution.

That's just my theory anyways.

I haven't followed the AppleTV at all but this seems interesting... do you have time to go into more detail regarding the game(s) you have found best?

That's really it that I've found for board games, but it seems like a great platform for it.

I mentioned the two-player mode of Crossy Road. My son (7yo) also enjoys "Goat". Which is like a modern Qbert? My daughter (3yo) digs the Thomas The Train "Express" game.

Then there's "Starwalk Kids" and "Solar Walk". Those manage to hold their interest a bit as well while I talk about the solar system with them.

It really does seem like a great platform for family time. The biggest issue is handing the very sensitive controller around and inadvertent rolls of dice or spins of a wheel.

I'm fairly excited to see how this develops... Hopefully the awful app discoverability doesn't crush otherwise worthy apps we'd be interested in.