Apple TV vs WebOS (LG G5)
Now that the price went up, I finally felt compelled to buy an Apple TV box (ATV) for the original price and get to see what it is about.
To give the context, I have an LG G5 with a tremendous amount of woe over their remote and UI, and some disappointment regarding their processing. To be precise, I thought the pointer and the scroller of the LG remote were neat, but I already broke one, which speaks to the quality of LG remotes. The UI was horrific until I turned off all ads, when it became tolerable. What was inexcusable was YouTube becoming slower to respond to the slider the longer I used the app in one session. And I was pretty much never happy with any particular picture setting. YouTube was the most disappointing, SDR content in general. Looks saturated until I enforced a warm color, which made it blend and look uniform. I figured some of these issues are not fixable by a box. But the ATV UI might come to the rescue a bit?
Now let's talk about Apple TV. Positives first.
The UI is smooth, yes.
The pictures also look cleaner. At least my partner is definitely convinced that Apple pictures are sharper and cleaner with more balanced color and brighter highlights. Something changed. I cannot exactly pinpoint what. The picture settings are definitely different between ATV and LG's webOS, which could also make the difference. The biggest suspect is that my ATV's picture setting is set to Dolby Vision (DV), so everything is up-converted to DV. That somehow solved my YouTube problem. Watching YouTube on ATV is much more pleasant.
The remote is sturdier than the LG remote. Definitely doesn't look like it is going to break in three months.
Now the negatives.
What's with the touchpad? I had to turn it off. And honestly, I have started to miss the pointer of the LG remote, which I think is neat. Why doesn't ATV even allow using the pointer? I guess it is complicated. I can't bring up LG's settings using the ATV remote. I hope I don't need to as much as I used to now that the picture is better.
What's with the ATV keyboard, showing all the letters linearly? It does not make sense. I know it can be changed. But the idea of Apple I thought was to let the user start with a set of well made choices. Maybe they want us to use siri instead.
And the UI is not uniformly better. In the Disney+ app, the slider is sometimes not working. I can only move forward or backward 10 seconds at a time. But if I try to slide further, the slider somehow did not work when watching a movie. Also, there is a downside to up-converting everything to DV. Some content is better in HDR10. It would have been better if there were a quick way of switching between the video formats.
Overall, my real question is whether it is worth spending so much given these pros and cons. I would say yes for the original price. No for the new price. And I wouldn't care about AI in the future versions unless it automatically figures out my intentions from my use and repeated change of settings and executes things accordingly.