I struggled through having a cheap Roku for a while last year, until I finally got frustrated and looked up what they cost to replace. Without me, and perhaps others who read this, noticing, they dropped to basically "disposable" levels of price. A new modern one is $27 for the normal HD and $40 for the HD. Well below the price of the frustration I experienced trying to keep one from a few generations back going, and I'm generally relatively conservative by local standards.

Don't struggle through a slow old Roku.

And, of course, I'm not really pitching Roku, if you've got another solution or want to switch companies, that's fine too. I'm just saying, anyone reading this who has a Roku a few generations back and having simply never thought about what to do about it, have a look at replacing it. Or any other streaming box that is generally choking. I remember getting into TiVos when they cost the modern equivalent of about $350-$400 and I still haven't fully internalized that streaming boxes can cost, well, more than "a coffee at starbucks" but at this point "less than a full meal for my family at a fast food joint".

As a counter point, you can buy a Apple TV and mine lasted maybe a decade. The cheapest one I see is $130ish. Why don't we try and keep electronic waste to a minimum by buying long lasting stuff. I know not everyone can afford a device that's a few times more expensive but it really isn't if you take the long view and it will be better for the planet.

To add to this, the first-gen Apple TV 4K I use, which was first released back in 2017, still runs the latest tvOS and works great. The A10X Fusion SoC in it is still a great deal more powerful than what's built into most streaming boxes in 2024. The current-gen Apple TV has an A15 Bionic which is much another huge step up in power.

They're not the cheapest thing out there, but you get a lot of muscle (and longevity) for your money.

My $30 second gen chromecast is still going strong, and I prefer it's "just a dumb box that runs special apps your phone apps tell it to" system, such that I never have to interact with it.

I may be misunderstanding, but don’t this involve an intermediary re-encoding when casting video from phone → dongle? If so that’s unavoidable quality loss which isn’t great and runs down phone battery unnecessarily. If it works for you though, that’s what’s important!

Aside from that, having a little extra power available can be nice for being able to smoothly play back video formats that the hardware doesn’t have acceleration for, obviating need for transcoding (via Plex or similar).

Phone is only a remote that tells the chromecast/fire/roku etc where to get the stream.

Meanwhile the 3rd Gen AppleTV was released in 2013 and was obsolete by 2015 when they released tvOS.

I owned the 1st gen (used) and 3rd gen. Terrible investments (imo).