I really wanted to make it work, but it ended up being an annoying hassle. I got a Shield TV and it has been a much better solution.
Not sure if things have changed since then (~5 years ago).
It's definitely not the most troublesome player I've dealt with, but rebooting and logging back into apps randomly can be frustrating.
If you want a privacy focused solution it's probably the most private. Yeah, admittedly harder to use but I'm not recommending it to my parents.
And I definitely don't want to pay for something like Plex.
I don't plan on upgrading it to this new version yet so I'll probably get 10+ years of use out of it, great value overall.
Siri AI is increasingly looking like a product that's exclusively for Americans. An unfortunate side effect of the EU attempting to become a regulatory superpower but failing to export its rules to the rest of the world.
- They don’t have to support European languages. Historically, they were horrible in this area, supporting only major languages and ignoring others for years. It’s almost impossible to ask Siri to play a song whose title is in one of these languages. Contact names are pronounced badly, and it’s sometimes tricky to ask Siri to call a person with a non-English name. This way, even though LLMs support these languages quite well, Apple doesn’t have to invest in development and testing.
- They announce the product with US features and keep the EU price the same, but disable features that cost them money, such as those requiring server-side compute.
- Satellite features only work in some EU countries, and there seems to be absolutely no progress in many markets. These markets are simply too small for Apple to care about. Yet the price is the same.
- They blame the EU for this.
Eg ask it to skip an ad in YT and it might actually skip to entire video.