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But if you have a house full of Apple stuff and enjoy AirPlay, you may as well complete your collection. Lately, it seems to care more about its Apple TV+ subscription service and app than its physical hardware. It doesn't update its models or its interface all that often. It also has most apps, but TV boxes remain a side project for Apple. Apple TV has a slick interface and Apple's usual gloss.If you buy or rent a lot of movies from Amazon, and subscribe to Prime, the Fire TV is appealing. Unfortunately, it sometimes feels like an ad for Amazon stuff more than a diverse ecosystem of apps and content. Amazon Fire TV is geared toward those who really enjoy Amazon's ecosystem, and it will quickly point you to its content.The only problem is that these don't manage storage quite as well. With its newest Chromecast, we stopped seeing the bugs and problems that used to plague the platform, and it includes basically every streaming app out there, as well as YouTube and Spotify. It's been around for years, but it just recently (in 2020) nailed the experience. Google TV, formerly called Android TV, is Google's latest streaming OS.You can also do this with Apple TV's Airplay 2 functionality, but you need an iOS or macOS device. Though that's no longer its main draw, it has the added benefit of letting you send web pages or other content directly from your smartphone (it's easiest on an Android Phone), which is sometimes quite handy. Chromecast used to eschew an interface altogether (and older models still hold true to this), but the newest version has Google TV built-in.The company survives solely on how well its streaming device platform performs.
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Roku also isn't made by one of the major tech companies.
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Plus, if you decide to switch TVs, you can just move your Roku to another TV in your house at any time.
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Roku is our favorite streaming OS because it has just about every streaming app there is, and setup is hassle-free.
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