Why the hell would you buy the Apple TV with the bigger drive?

[rdrr]

Who’s installing drivers? The devices in my house that are on wired ethernet don’t require me to install drivers. LG smart tv (with smart features now turned off other than airplay), dish network boxes (yay me! I got rid of those last week!), 3 NAS’s, 2 Macs, A/V receiver, Nintendo switch, 4 Apple TVs, a few unmanaged switches, a router and 4 mesh points …. All of those are wired and none involve drivers.

Never mind I am not expounding on my point, I was talking about drivers around the wifi. One that I recently had to deal with at work that a driver was the culprit of perceived wifi issues, Was just trying to explain that the biases about wifi (while deserved in the past), isn't justified today. It's a fight I have to deal with on a daily basis, and quite frankly I get too annoyed when I see it off hours. So I will just shut up about it now and let everyone do what is best for them.

 

[Citysnaps]

Yeah, thanks. Sonic is quoting me the same price, though it looks like i have to use their router or something (hopefully it can be put in bridge mode?). I see it also has the VOIP thing, but I wouldn’t use it - ditched my phone years ago.

How is it wired into your house? That would be a concern for me - the wiring would have to get to someplace that probably wouldn’t be all that easy to get to - I understand an AT&T person does the install and I had problems with them back in the DSL days when I needed them to do some wiring.

Hmmm...back when we signed up I think there may have been a combo router/wifi box available, but not mandatory. I'd try pushing back on that.

Our neighborhood is old, but the house is new (I did all the ethernet and TV coax cabling that ends up in a closet with router/switches/patchpanel/MacMini/etc), thus utilities are handled via utility poles. A Sonic technician dropped a reinforced (clever how that's done) fiber from the pole across the street to the exterior side of our garage secured at a roof rafter tail and then terminating into a small plastic box on the side of the garage. A week later a second Sonic tech patched a short fiber from the exterior box to the interior ONT.

During house construction, I installed a duplex electrical box to handle whatever internet service we'd eventually go with. We ended up starting with xfinity. They put their exterior cable box at the side of the house and connected to the jack marked Comcast in the photo, which I patched into my cable modem in the closet.

When we switched to Sonic, they mounted their exterior small box near xfinity's and routed the fiber cable through the duplex box brush grommet and into the ONT. I had pre-mounted a piece of wood on the wall to which they attached the ONT.

Oh...the legacy phone number I requested years ago and holding onto, it ends in -8080.

 

[Cmaier]

Hmmm...back when we signed up I think there may have been a combo router/wifi box available, but not mandatory. I'd try pushing back on that.

Our neighborhood is old, but the house is new (I did all the ethernet and TV coax cabling that ends up in a closet with router/switches/patchpanel/MacMini/etc), thus utilities are handled via utility poles. A Sonic technician dropped a reinforced (clever how that's done) fiber from the pole across the street to the exterior side of our garage secured at a roof rafter tail and then terminating into a small plastic box on the side of the garage. A week later a second Sonic tech patched a short fiber from the exterior box to the interior ONT.

During house construction, I installed a duplex electrical box to handle whatever internet service we'd eventually go with. We ended up starting with xfinity. They put their exterior cable box at the side of the house and connected to the jack marked Comcast in the photo, which I patched into my cable modem in the closet.

When we switched to Sonic, they mounted their exterior small box near xfinity's and routed the fiber cable through the duplex box brush grommet and into the ONT. I had pre-mounted a piece of wood on the wall to which they attached the ONT.

Oh...the legacy phone number I requested years ago and holding onto, it ends in -8080.

Thanks.

In my case they can easily get to the garage exterior wall, and I guess the ONT could go on the interior wall, but since wifi in the garage wouldn’t do me much good we’d have to come up with a way to get from the ONT to the interior of my house. I’ve got coax for cable running from the exterior of that wall to the right place, but no cat5/6. I’d probably need something convoluted, like running cat6 across the garage, to the floor, and then into the crawlspace. Or up into the attic over the garage, bridged to coax (that was for my satellite and isn’t used, and which terminates on the other end at a place where there is cat6. Or something even uglier than those choices.

 

[Citysnaps]

Thanks.

In my case they can easily get to the garage exterior wall, and I guess the ONT could go on the interior wall, but since wifi in the garage wouldn’t do me much good we’d have to come up with a way to get from the ONT to the interior of my house. I’ve got coax for cable running from the exterior of that wall to the right place, but no cat5/6. I’d probably need something convoluted, like running cat6 across the garage, to the floor, and then into the crawlspace. Or up into the attic over the garage, bridged to coax (that was for my satellite and isn’t used, and which terminates on the other end at a place where there is cat6. Or something even uglier than those choices.

Would a different exterior wall work better? I imagine your utilities are underground?

Perhaps the fiber could be routed around the exterior of your house to a better location?

 

[Cmaier]

Would a different exterior wall work better? I imagine your utilities are underground?

Perhaps the fiber could be routed around the exterior of your house to a better location?

It’s possible, but it would have to run the entire length of the house, probably under the lower roofline. Could be done, but not sure it’s a better idea or not. Next time I rip out all the sheet rock I’ll rewire things

 

[Citysnaps]

It’s possible, but it would have to run the entire length of the house, probably under the lower roofline. Could be done, but not sure it’s a better idea or not. Next time I rip out all the sheet rock I’ll rewire things

At least you have options. Might not be so bad running it under your roofline if they're willing to do it. May not even be a big deal. The sheathed fiber is around a 1/3rd the diameter of a TV coax cable - could even be unnoticeable from a distance.

OTOH, running a Cat 6A up to your garage ceiling and over to the opposite wall and either into your attic or back down the wall and poking into your crawlspace sounds good. Though personally I hate crawling around in attics and crawlspaces.

 

[Chew Toy McCoy]

We went to Pigeon Forge a couple of weeks ago. If you have ever been there you know some of the cabins are up the side of a mountain. Just so happened the one we rented didn't have cable or satellite TV (too far out for cable, no LOS for sat) so we were thinking for any TV (they did have an antenna for local channels) we would need to bring it with us. So we loaded a few movies and TV shows on the wife's old Mini and took it. Worked great.

But a Hard Drive in the ATV that you could downlaod content to would have been better.

It’s ridiculous you can’t store media on a media hub. It’s like having an EV you can only drive while it’s plugged into a charger.

 

[Nycturne]

Today, the rate coming directly out of the ONT (optical network terminal) mounted in the garage (fiber pokes through the garage wall into the ONT) is around 745 Mb/sec. In the past, I've seen it as high as 940 Mb/sec.

As a bit of an aside, moving to 1Gbps fiber got me to finally replace my AirPort Extreme as our router. It could only route at about 750Mbps when dealing with the WAN port, like many older routers.

Not saying that is why you are seeing the speed, just the number you mentioned reminded me of this.

It’s ridiculous you can’t store media on a media hub. It’s like having an EV you can only drive while it’s plugged into a charger.

I think the problem is that Apple doesn’t see the Apple TV as a media hub, but as a consumption endpoint.

Developers aren’t even allowed to store anything persistent on the local storage. They can put things in a cache directory, but the documentation makes it clear that the OS can and will delete anything stored there when it feels like it.

 

[Citysnaps]

Not saying that is why you are seeing the speed, just the number you mentioned reminded me of this.

Interesting. Though I'm using a Ubiquiti Edge Router X, I'll look into the specs (I've forgotten what they are) to see if that's a limitation. Thanks! It could be a function or result of the router rules set up.

But honestly, after living with AT&T DSL at 1-2 Mb/sec for 20 years, I'm thrilled with almost anything!

 

[Nycturne]

Interesting. Though I'm using a Ubiquiti Edge Router X, I'll look into the specs (I've forgotten what they are) to see if that's a limitation. Thanks! It could be a function or result of the router rules set up.

But honestly, after living with AT&T DSL at 1-2 Mb/sec for 20 years, I'm thrilled with almost anything!

As long as it's configured for hardware NAT and QoS isn't enabled, there's no reason it can't. I'm using the EdgeRouter 4 (found an open box for a reasonable price) myself. Commercial grade routers generally have more routing capacity.

It's more stuff meant for home use from years ago (Airport Extreme was from 2013) where 1Gbps WAN wasn't common that tended to have issues. Recent stuff has gotten better.

EDIT: QoS enabled would bring speeds well below what you are seeing, IIRC. Hardware NAT being disabled seems to cap the ERX to 500Mbps or so. So I suspect things are fine on your end.

 

[Citysnaps]

As long as it's configured for hardware NAT and QoS isn't enabled, there's no reason it can't. I'm using the EdgeRouter 4 (found an open box for a reasonable price) myself. Commercial grade routers generally have more routing capacity.

It's more stuff meant for home use from years ago (Airport Extreme was from 2013) where 1Gbps WAN wasn't common that tended to have issues. Recent stuff has gotten better.

EDIT: QoS enabled would bring speeds well below what you are seeing, IIRC. Hardware NAT being disabled seems to cap the ERX to 500Mbps or so. So I suspect things are fine on your end.

Thanx for the heads-up - appreciate it!

 

[DT]

Oh, that's poop. We have a 1st Gen 4K downstairs, I was thinking of eventually moving it to our bedroom, getting a 2nd Gen 4K, but I always get the lowest storage model since up till now, all models came with ethernet <meh>.

Since I wanted an ethernet model, and I figured a small, incremental improvement would be plenty for now, I picked up a 32GB 4K Gen 2 for $60, used but mint condition, all the original packaging, etc.

 

[throAU]

You could probably download every app available on the app store on the smaller drive Apple TV and still have room to spare.

AFAIK you still can’t download movies, TV shows, or music to the Apple TV….which pissed off many users, including myself, of the early Apple TVs that had that ability removed in later models. It’s ridiculous you can download video to a tiny screen iPhone with default cellular connection but can’t to a device explicitly made to plug in to a TV and requires you to have a wifi connection. There’s still plenty of areas with spotty or nonexistent internet or you might have limited data you don't want to chew up.

You can actually play games on it.

it supports bluetooth controllers, and with the newer 4k and later variants it isn't a terrible gaming platform.

Expect that to be carried forward to a larger degree now Apple is focusing on actual gaming support with Metal 3, etc. on the Mac and the plethora of stuff on the iOS App Store.

 

[DT]

Since I wanted an ethernet model, and I figured a small, incremental improvement would be plenty for now, I picked up a 32GB 4K Gen 2 for $60, used but mint condition, all the original packaging, etc.

Arrived today, looked brand new, all the original packaging, even the covers for the individual components. Forgot how easy the initial setup goes, hold phone close, authentication, apps are downloaded, iCloud setup. It's a bummer you have to re-auth into the 3rd party apps, that's a PITA ... you should be able to opt into a store-in-the-cloud option for a simpler setup.

So no adjustments, fired up Annihilation (kind of chosen at random), 4K, DV, looked and sounded amazing without any fiddling, and I mean I felt like it looked and sounded better than the Gen 1 it replaced[?]

It's definitely a good bit perkier, navigating around apps, video starting, I know it's not a huge difference, but it's noticeable.

 

[Cmaier]

Arrived today, looked brand new, all the original packaging, even the covers for the individual components. Forgot how easy the initial setup goes, hold phone close, authentication, apps are downloaded, iCloud setup. It's a bummer you have to re-auth into the 3rd party apps, that's a PITA ... you should be able to opt into a store-in-the-cloud option for a simpler setup.

So no adjustments, fired up Annihilation (kind of chosen at random), 4K, DV, looked and sounded amazing without any fiddling, and I mean I felt like it looked and sounded better than the Gen 1 it replaced[?]

It's definitely a good bit perkier, navigating around apps, video starting, I know it's not a huge difference, but it's noticeable.

I’m not looking forward to installing mine tomorrow. I have a very complicated setup, and it will be replacing a first gen 4k in a rack. Getting the IR remote stuff working is going to be a pain, if history is any guide. First trick will be to find where they put the IR receiver this time - they move it from time to time which has caused my stereo installer problems

 

[DT]

For our setup, the AppleTV controls the TV volume (the remote connects over WiFi, so works from anywhere, no LOS needed), which in turn controls the volume of the Sonos system, so the volume control just worked OOTB.

 

[Cmaier]

For our setup, the AppleTV controls the TV volume (the remote connects over WiFi), so works from anywhere, no LOS needed), which in turn controls the volume of the Sonos system, so the volume control just worked OOTB.

Yeah, i can’t do that. I have a marantz av receiver with two outputs (a projector and an oled tv, which have different resolutions), two Apple TVs plugged into that (one HD and one 4K), and various other sources (nintendo switch, etc.). The remote is activity-based, so if you want to watch a movie on the projector using Apple TV, you hit one button and it turns off the lights, lowers the screen, turns on the amp, turns on the Apple TV, sets the AV source, selects the appropriate set of 5.1 speakers, etc., turns off any unused sources, turns off the oled tv, etc.

 

[DT]

Oh yeah, I used to have Phase Linears, AVR, external amps, meters of 1/2" thick cable, etc., holy smokes, I'm glad I simplified things.