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Amazon “Fire TV” remotes - DESIGNED to be thrown away!
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SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: Gyro on January 11, 2022, 09:29:23 pm ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on January 10, 2022, 10:41:19 pm ---Forget the remotes... Amazon Fire TV devices themselves are designed to be thrown away!

This is how it works: Amazon designs and sells a Fire TV device, like the Cube. It mostly works fine and the UI is responsive. They then come out with a series of newer models with updated, faster CPUs and more RAM. They add new features to the software that takes advantage of the increased CPU power and additional RAM... But now the older devices run like dogs and the UI is slow and laggy and nearly unusable. The only viable solution is to upgrade to the latest Fire TV device.

Rather than continuing on the Fire TV treadmill, I've switched to a Nvidia Shield TV Pro. Hopefully it won't have the planned obsolescence issue Fire TV does.

--- End quote ---

That's a hell of a lot better than the experience with the White NowTV boxes (subsidised Roku LT boxes) in the UK. They could be used with the main free UK streaming services but NowTV decided that they were no longer up to the job and stopped supporting them. Of course their last firmware update was used to disable the ability to enter developer mode by a remote button sequence, preventing them from being converted into a Plex media server or something else vaguely useful.

Power them up now and the just sit there like dumb bricks, displaying on the TV screen a message that they are no longer supported . Premeditated e-waste creation!

--- End quote ---

Another item to add to the "Why I avoid cloud services" pile?
SiliconWizard:
The "All your base are belong to us" business model. :-DD
NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: SilverSolder on January 11, 2022, 02:31:58 am ---How high performance does it need to be to show TV content though?

--- End quote ---
It takes a surprising amount of compute power to upscale to 4K. The mpv upscaler I tuned for my PC uses about 30% of a 970, about 1 TFLOPS of FP32.
SiliconWizard:
The good thing with a free market is that if Amazon just makes crap, people will stop buying their products, right? Or will they? :popcorn:
Gyro:
Hmm, I bought a Fire Stick lite last week, It seems pretty good so far. I bought it.... because Sony had stopped supporting streaming services on my relatively recent (in my eyes anyway!) non-Android TV.  :palm:

I had been reduced to plugging the TV into the Displayport on my laptop if I wanted to watch iPlayer or any of the other main streaming services. My logic is that the future e-waste potential of the Fire stick is smaller than trashing an, otherwise perfectly good, FHD TV and buying a new one with an unfeasibly large screen (don't get me started on 4k!).
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