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Originally Posted by OtterBooks
You could drop games from the device and the extra grunt supplied by the cpu, graphics processing and memory increase is going to affect playback, load times and buffering ability, unless Amazon really screwed things up somehow.
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That implies that the additional processing power can made a difference. Looking at the Roku 3 and AppleTV neither of those suffer from the lower hardware specs. In other words, they could quadruple the hardware performance and it wouldn't change the playback performance/quality. In the future with 4K video? Sure. But with today's streaming source files, no benefits under most use cases.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OtterBooks
I'm not wowed by voice recognition usually, but if it works it may be a nice boon over the virtual keyboard. Throw in things like additional connectivity (the optical audio seems redundant, though) and comparable content (with fair reason to believe it's going to grow), all at the same price as the Roku 3 and the burden of "why" falls on the Roku. Imagine the specifications were swapped. The Fire would be dead in the water, imo.
Those Fire TV specs aren't impressive, per se. They're relatively impressive, but combined with Amazon's clout for content, at the same price it's enough. Roku can, and should match the processing specs. Roku needs to up their game.
side note: I'm a bit skeptical of Amazon's claim of better audio processing. They list Dolby Digital Plus as a feature, but I thought the Roku already had DD+.
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You're enamored with the Fire TV hardware, and that's fine. I'm not seeing why the glowing praise for the hardware specs are warranted. But that's me.
I almost never buy hardware for the future capabilities. First, because there's no guarantee that those future capabilities will ever be realized. Though that's not a real issue with Amazon, they'll produce it. But second, because there's a premium to pay for the technology today.
I buy what works now (which is generally cheaper) and THEN when the higher end hardware can be used to it's capabilities, I'll buy the hardware (which will be cheaper than it is today).