I am getting a new TV. Like 99+% mine will be a Smart TV and I can get the TV’s Apps for all the stuff I stream. Curently I use an Apple TV box and I could easily continue that - or I could use the various apps for the SonyTV.
I would be interested in any comments people have about advantages one way of the other.
As an Apple guy, I have purchased an early AppleTV hockey puck, then as 4K came along, bought the later 4K version, but while it is handy to use as far as it’s link to my Mac, I find I rarely fire it up any more because the new Smart TVs, LG in my case, have the App in it’s system, so there’s not a lot of need of the AppleTV units… Changing times, I guess… But as I said with the AppleTV unit, I can see all my photo collection folders that are on my Mac, and they look really nice, even on the 65" LG screen… BIL came by with his recent Greece trip pics, loved them on my Mac, was pretty easy to show them on screen, mistakes and all, later I edited them, with the new Photos App, the Clean Up menu let my clear away tourists easier than ever, pretty handy…
So, while I haven’t removed the AppleTV unit, it’s not used so much any more for Movies, Series we follow on AppleTV+, subscribed…
I got away from Sony when we went to flat screens, the displays at Costco hooked us on LG, we had Samsungs before, but they were no Smart, so we gave them away as we moved on… A matching LG Sound Bar/subwoofer also helped, too…
Other family members us the Firestick, but we haven’t seen the need so far…
WeCoGuy, do you get any indication the AppleTV App on your LG updates peroiodically? I am not sure why or if there are any new features – just checking I guess.
I like the remote that comes with my firestick better than the remote that comes with my LG TV I just bought. Maybe it’s the familiarity. But once you get the new tv and check out the remote, you might decide to stick with your Apple remote.
I bought a new OLED TV from Costco and it is great. The screen is very vivid.
Even though I bought a smart LG 65" OLED tv a while back (at Costco, of course) I kept using the 4K ROKU for streaming. I never even explored the smart features. Until, that is, I saw this thread and got curious. When I opened a couple of specific apps (Netflix, Amazon Prime) it told me they needed to be updated; that took less than a minute each, so I imagine that will be true in general.
But now I have to make sense of it all. Confusing me very much is how it was showing me my cable channels without (I think) access to my cable box. Worse, it knew what I watched yesterday via my cable box.
No, not that I’ve noticed, I think the various Apps do their own updates as needed in the background, or maybe as called up. I do, once in a while see the LG updates, but I also watch the ’ Accelerate Your Mac!’ site for the LG updates, for my model, not sure how Sony, Samsung handle them… Since we have Xfinity, I use their remote, it lets me do voice requests for the channel or show, we want…
Let me say that most newish TV’s still have stanky sound, and your ”viewing” experience will be greatly improved with a medium priced or better sound bar with a sub-bass box.
I love my OLED Samsung, and the sound from Bose sound bar with bass is a huge part of the joy.
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My parents have that remote and it is terribly laggy. So much so that it would be useless for me. Only reason I had to play with it is because I was helping my mom login to a streaming app on the box.