After spending a week with a Fire TV Stick, I quickly realized my smart TV was holding me back and that streaming boxes are the superior choice. I’ll be ignoring smart TVs from now on.
4
Streaming Boxes Are Way More Responsive
Although my Vizio smart TV was a mid-tier 4K television, navigating apps was usually irritating, sometimes downright unresponsive. Meanwhile, my Fire TV Stick zooms around like a speed demon.
Navigation extends to using the apps themselves, too, making it particularly frustrating to use. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to pause something, noticed it didn’t respond, and pressed the Pause button again, only for it to unpause my movie because it finally caught up with my initial command. Now I’m in a pause war with my TV!
3
App Support is Notably Better
It’s great that smart TVs have many streaming services pre-installed, but there’s just one itty-bitty problem: There’s no guarantee the TV will have every streaming service you want, nor is there a guarantee you can download missing ones from an app store.
More importantly, streaming boxes offer a much better experience as far as app support is concerned, in terms of both compatibility and updates. For example, Netflix ended support for certain smart TVs, making it unusable. Streaming boxes are in it for the long haul.
2
It’s Easier and Cheaper to Replace
Speaking of which, if and when my Fire TV Stick starts to show its age, it’s cheap to replace, anyway. It’d be incredibly expensive to replace my smart TV whenever the apps stop getting support.
The Fire TV Stick Lite is $30, the Fire TV Stick HD is $35, and the Fire TV Stick 4K is $50. Meanwhile, if I replace my smart TV with a cheap option, I could pay nearly four times the cost of a Fire Stick 4K and get an objectively worse experience.
1
I Can Move the Streaming Box When I Need To
Personally, I’d rather separate the two devices. First off, it’s much cheaper to get a “dumb” TV, and if I wanted, I could opt for a bigger TV for the same price as a smaller smart TV. More to the point, when I eventually replace my TV, I can simply plug in my streaming box and voilà—it’s a smart TV.
It’s great that you can get a smart TV for pretty cheap, but it’d also be nice if said televisions weren’t fitted with the slowest SoCs ever. Maybe then they could compete with streaming boxes a little better. Until then, I’m going to happily upgrade my Fire TV Stick every couple of years and dramatically extend the life of my TV before it’s inevitably upgraded, too.
