Apple TV vs Firestick.

Technology@lemmy.world – 29 points – 11 months ago

So. I just bought a new telly and to my surprise, not, the OS is rather bad and has very limited amount of apps. Therefore I'll invest further in either Apple TV or the Firestick. Anyone got any recommendations, tips or hot takes on this? Which has more adds, and can it be blocked via DNS? Further read that Firestick could be jailbreaked, that has my interest 🦊

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Apple TV doesn’t have ads at all. If that’s all you care about, I would say go for that.

The Firestick isn’t really jailbreakable per se, but it doesn’t really need to be. You can sideload things with extreme ease. There’s a pretty decent app that allows you to watch YouTube with no ads or sponsored content shown. That alone is worth the cost of a Firestick for me. It does have some ads in the menu, but they’re not super obtrusive and never bothered me much. Plus the cost is much lower. You used to be able to put a different launcher on the Firestick and never see any Amazon content at all (ads) but they fixed that a while back and I haven’t bothered to see if that works again, but for all I know it might.

Edit: it does.

Thanks for the insight, I'm actually able to get the Apple TV for the same price as the Firestick where I live. Second hand that is.

Edit: No I cannot - i totally misunderstood the generations of Apple TV.. 😅

I have an older Apple TV (I think I bought it in 2017-2018), and the only thing it’s missing is 4K support. It’s not slow at all and it gets updates just fine. Only real “bad” thing is that the controller is the older model which is a bit clunky to use but you can get a new one separately if you want.

I have both and only use the firestick to watch YouTube because I side loaded a YouTube client that blocks ads

Personally, I just like to AirPlay YouTube videos from Safari with an ad blocker to my TV whenever I want YouTube on it. So that’s one work around if you ever need it

I just like everything to work with the remote. Plus I don’t like the idea of having to pull out and tie up my phone while I’m watching YouTube on the tv.

Reasonable enough