kw123 wrote:None of them is stable. They all hang. Need to be power cycled and then you need to reenter password . once a day.. don't have eg HGTV
AND wife is lost in the menus .. wants old style simple remote back
Am I the only one with these problems?
I have an Apple TV 4k, and Apple TV 4, and an Apple TV 3 (this one is almost exclusively for Hulu), all of which are used for some period of time every day. I don't
frequently experience any of the issues you're describing.
I do periodically (a couple of times a month at most) have to enter my passwords again. HBO Now seems to be the worst of the bunch and it's more difficult because they want you to authenticate with their servers even though you're paying through Apple so you have to remember that username/password as well, but it does happen in other places. I'm still chalking this up to the relative newness of the apps on the 4's. But that is quickly becoming an excuse that doesn't hold water...
On the 4's, I do sometimes have to reboot (less than once a month). I suspect (but don't know for sure) that the auto update mechanism puts things into an odd state that just requires a reboot. It's definitely not to the point that I would consider putting them on a controllable device so I could automate the restart and hopefully it will never get that bad.
I use Harmony Remotes to control them and for the most part they do everything. If for some reason I have to force-quit an app (3rd party app quality is another story) on the 4's then I have to get the Apple remote (I could probably fix that if I could find the right button definition) but it's not yet a big enough issue to really look into it. There are a few 3rd party apps that really require the Apple TV remote, but I just don't use those apps (after sending a note to the developers). For streaming apps, there is
no good reason to require gestures for control.
<rant>I find the Netflix app on the 4's to be terrible. Hard to navigate, sometimes things just don't show up (the My List and the Continue Watching lines very frequently just disappear, only to reappear after minutes/hours). The Netflix guys spend way too much time trying to make all their apps look/feel the same. And the result is that they generally suck everywhere IMO. Way too much of the screen is dedicated to the detail and not nearly enough to the list(s).</rant>