I had an older Apple TV but was tired of the shitty remote and a friend recommended the Fire Stick. After a couple years I’m ready for something else; the interface is cluttered, confusing and inconsistent, the player interface is inconsistent, and I’m sick of as you say how laggy it is.
It’s classic iPhone vs android; you have two choices, either the prison of a nice walled garden or the cluttered chaotic crap.
I did mention this in my original post, but it wasn’t the point of the post, so I didn’t dwell on it.
But, yes, the recent UI changes were horrible. It now takes a lot more clicks to do common tasks and they moved my cheese! All the years of aquired muscle memory of performing tasks is gone. It reminds me of other poor UI choices like the close window buttons in OSX which don’t have their symbols in them until you mouse over them. Yes, I know the colors are supposed to be a hint as to their function, but some of us are colorblind and don’t find that very useful. They literally made the code more complex to reduce the functionality to make it look ‘cool’.
Was it the first generation one? That one was horribly laggy. The only way I got any use out of it was to factory reset it a couple of times a year. All the ones since then have been much better. I agree that the remote is probably one of the best parts of it. The remote that comes with the 4K stick (I don’t know about the MAX) is really handy as it has an IR transmitter in it so it can adjust the volume of whatever device you want it to and it can control the power state of devices–say you need a tuner powered on as well as a TV to watch things, it can do both devices. That’s my situation. I also use the tuner for volume instead of the TV and it had no problem adapting to that. So, even if the stick itself wasn’t all that great (it’s okay), the remote really brought a lot of value to the proposition.
Due to their recent promotion, I ordered a “Chromecase with Google TV” stick which I’ll soon be trying. It won’t be here in time for this thread to be still alive, but I’ll ‘review’ it in a BBS post if you are interested. I’ve never used any of the chromecast or google TV devices, so the UI will be all new to me, so it should be hilarious how badly I deal with it. 
I haven’t owned a TV since the 90’s, but I tried a Fire Stick for watching the Olympics a few years ago. It really was amazing how crappy the thing is. Slow and bloated with ads and I had to do some contortions to get access to Google Play. And I understand that’s not even possible anymore, so you’re stuck with Amazon’s shockingly crappy walled garden:
Caveat emptor! And another example of how BoingBoing has, sadly, become a crapware vendor.
I assume you used it on a computer monitor. If that’s the case, why not just use your computer to access streaming services?
That being said, I have a semi-older fire stick that was in a drawer (I use AppleTV in the living room connected to my stereo, HDMI out to the TV) and took it on vacation this year so we could watch movies at night. Honestly, I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary ad-wise. Just turned it on and went to either Prime or Netflix to watch what we wanted.
The only issue I had was that I couldn’t find the remote before we left so I had to do some trickery with our phones to get it on wireless as you can’t use BT with the phone app.
You do understand the concept of sponsored article?
That’s an affiliate code. Any link on the site gets them added if they go to a shop that BB has a deal with. Welcome to BB, BTW.
