Technology

Even without having other Apple products. The only real benefit I see with the Apple TV — I do have other Apple products — is I can AirPlay to it. But, it isn't very stable for whatever reason. The connection will just drop. So I AirPlay to the TV itself instead, and that works, though sometimes the audio doesn't, so I just route it back to the MacBook, which has very good speakers, and it's fine. Or I grab my Thunderbolt to HDMI and plug in directly, turn the TV into a monitor — but, this bypasses the Apple TV (but, so does AirPlaying to the TV itself). Oh, and I can use my phone or watch as a remote. All in all it's perfectly fine if you don't have any other Apple stuff.

The one thing it's really lacking is some Dolby codec that people need to play Blu-ray rips. People in communities like Plex and Jellyfin complain about that. But those are like 50GB+ per movie, I don't have that kind of storage to even come close to caring about that issue. It can still play 4K content, just not with that one codec.

In fact, it's probably one of the best Apple devices out there, just because the competition is so much worse. I'd also say the same thing about the iPad, and the MacBook. You can make a case for a gaming PC, but for a laptop that isn't gonna game because battery is an issue, you're going for efficiency, it's really hard to beat the MacBook. As for the iPad, it's hard to tell which Android tablets are good and which ones aren't — or which ones will never get updated. And iPad got a lot of love this year, it's basically a desktop OS now (it's like macOS lite at this point). No, you still can't install whatever you want — need an actual computer for that.