alt Hacker NewsI 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.
I've always found HomeKit to be far too limited. For a lot of Matter sensors it's doesn't even show all information. I've found Home Assistant unbeatable and it got a lot more user-friendly.
I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.