How My Roku LT Forced Me to Smash It in a Vise and Buy an Apple TV
"Roku makes every part of the TV experience better, including the ads." I did not enjoy the ads, but did enjoy compacting it in a vise. A rant.
Circa 15 years ago, I primarily watched TV via an antenna, plus a desktop PC hooked up to our living room screen. This was before “cord cutting” became the norm, and overall it worked out pretty well. For our secondary TV, perched above an elliptical machine that we still own and use, we chose a 720P Roku player. This box allowed us to access Netflix and Amazon prime with a relatively simple interface. All was well.
Fast-forward to today (with an upgrade ~8 years ago), and the Roku interface has devolved from pretty good into an ad-infested swamp. As shown below, your Roku experience might include a guy from Experian trying to step out of your TV to give you unsolicited financial advice, random icons that you didn’t ask for, and other distracting video ads that chew up untold bandwidth.
They claim that, “Roku makes every part of the TV experience better, including the ads.” Which is the sort of garbage that you write as a corporate person and don’t believe. Then you and everyone else go along with even though they don’t like/believe it either, since they want to seem like team players…
…and want to keep having a job since AI is coming for it, etc, etc. Then AI gets taught to emulate said behavior, this drivel gets propagated, and the eventual result is a Terminator-like future where guys dressed like Mr. Rodgers in a purple cardigan1 step out of the TV and literally bores you to death about your credit report.
Long story short, I not only threw my Roku LT in the garbage, but also smashed it in a vise beforehand to prevent Experian-purple-guy from becoming sentient and initiating a bordeom-apocalypse. So without further ado, here is what Roku LT looks like when it’s subjected to a Wilton vise2:
Lest Ye Go The Same Way Apple TV:
So as not to come off as a fan person3, Apple TV isn’t perfect either. It’s not cool that there are apps like Apple Fitness that you can’t delete. Also, no one wants the home screen to go to Apple TV+ (which can be changed). Normally, I would give this device a B-, but if we’re grading on a curve, I guess I have to bump it up to an A.
Most importantly, I don’t think my Apple TV is going to become sentient and send its Roku-purple-guy-analog to torture me. However, secrecy at Apple is supposedly pretty tight, so who really knows?
Alternatively, you could use a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi for streaming and for Netflix. Something like this Beelink Mini PC (which I bought a few years ago for another purpose) might also work, giving you access to stuff available on Windows (or Linux, if you want to go that route). While I have a few available, setting up a Raspberry Pi for Netflix streaming (as outlined here) appears to be a rather complicated procedure that I didn’t want to take on.
I have more to say about my initial impressions of Apple TV, along with some neat wire management and mounting tricks, but it seemed better to break that up into a separate post 👇👇 Also, no one is literally forcing me to buy any sort of streaming device, sentient or not.4 If you are bored, you could start on the first Tech Adjacent post and read sequentially from there. I’m not counting the “Coming soon” auto-post.
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC
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Addendum/Footnotes:
Is that a cardigan? I don’t know. Being from Florida, I do see that he’s wearing a nice pair of ankle-length shorts.
A Wilton vise, if you’re interested in buying one. It was quite a bit less expensive when I purchased it in 2020. Nonetheless, if you’re from Wilton and would like to sponsor Tech Adjacent, I’m open to offers.
For that matter, if you’re from Apple or Roku your money is green to me as well. And sure, you could argue that smashing my former streaming box was gratuitous.
Fan person, so as to include everyone, regardless of age or gender. Interestingly, I went from mostly not being a fan of Apple to having a iMac, iPhone, and now Apple TV in the space of a few years. Yes, the ecosystem is locked down, but there’s something to be said for things that just work. Windows seems to be filled with more and more AI/Copilot garbage these days, and as much as I enjoyed my stint with Ubuntu as my primary OS years ago, I don’t think I have the terminal skillz for Linux to fulfill all my computing needs.
Wow, this post was really grumpy. Maybe the next one will be less so. No guarantees!
Though if it became sentient, would it force you to buy ont?