Plus you can de-google those things in a few minutes and make them as barebones as you want. I have a bunch of them connected to all of the TVs that I manage for my family and friends.

I used to live and die by cheap streaming boxes. Then I got on the Nvidia Shield TV bandwagon for many years and it was both way better & way more hackable, so I thought I'd never want anything else. Then someone gave me an old AppleTV. It was so good I now have 2 and gave away all my other TV devices.

It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.

About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.

Even the FireTV is shite compared to an apple TV.

The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.

I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.