You mean twice the ram (1 gig more than the shield), 4 times the storage (32 gigs), and a better remote (chirping find my remote feature, programmable button, and less shitty volume buttons)?
Yep. Sure sounds worse considering it also supports all the same features of the chromecast 4k and AV1 decoding.
They’re supposedly using pretty much the same chipset. So the most important part is still underpowered, these Android boxes generally work fine even with 2-3GBs of RAM.
There’s already plenty of devices on the market with this chip, and it’s fine, but in real world as a user you won’t really see any improvement over something like a nearly 10 year old Nvidia Shield that’s still using a more powerful chipset.
Just regular Chromecast, not that Google TV stuff. That round dongle that does nothing but accept casting streams via that cast button in many Android apps.
So the one from 2013? Sure. It was fine for that. This is a different thing, as not every device, service, or whatever supports casting. I wish they did, but they don’t.
Secondarily, I don’t want to use a screen to control a screen. I prefer a physical remote that I can have muscle memory for.
But I get why people liked the device. I did too. But fortunately or unfortunately, it’s been 10 years and technology has moved. Which is probably why they are giving this a new name being an generally good upgrade on the last Chromecast 4K.
Christ, this one even has a built in Ethernet port and doesn’t put strain on my HDMI port by just dangling there.
So the one from 2013? Sure. It was fine for that. This is a different thing, as not every device, service, or whatever supports casting. I wish they did, but they don’t.
Well, the story is about Google ending that line of products.
With a direct successor product that contains all the same features as the last Chromecast device. If you are mourning the loss of the casting only Chromecast, that died long ago production-wise.
The last casting only device (Chromecast Gen3) was originally released in 2018 (6 years ago). They stopped selling it in 2022. And it is still supported with updates. They supported the original with 10 years of updates. If all ya wanna do is cast, keep using it. I personally want more than a cast point.
Great. Where did I say you cannot have that? You’re acting weirdly defensively for something nobody is trying to take away from you. OK, maybe Google will in 2 years. All I said was that for casting the regular Chromecast is fine and you’re turning that into something overly emotional for no reason.
I’m not emotional, I just find the rage about this topic insane as they legit just changed the name of a product and gave it good iterative upgrades over the previous model by addressing their customer pain points. Especially when the casting feature is now highly integrated across most modern devices. It’s not like someone said they will never make a cheaper device than this one. And frankly, if one wants to point to enshittification of Google products, there are much better places to point than their hardware division.
Sorry if I appear emotional? I don’t feel emotional. I’m just responding in a way I feel is rational to the barrage of comments replying to me. If anything, there seems to be an emotional charge in the opposite direction. But I’m sure that’s just in my reading 20 of them directed at me. I’m genuinely excited about this product because it shows that Google cares about a product I like to the point where they want to make it better.
I’m not emotional, I just find the rage about this topic insane
Yes, you are and you must have me confused with someone else because I made no emotional / rageful comments. The only emotional between you and me is you and I don’t care to engage any longer.
Yeah, I have a smart TV and would appreciate some faster processing in there. Or if I can flash a simplified ROM, but dunno if those exist. As long as I get control over what it does, I’d take it. Can just Velcro it on the back of the TV so it’s invisible.
I have a smart TV as well, but refuse to connect it directly to wifi. As I tried that when I bought it and it insta-bricked itself and had to go through the hassle of returning a delivered TV.
A custom ROM for this device would be interesting. I know that the Chromecast 4K can do a custom ROM, but only if it was running an older os version before you flash it, as the bootloader couldn’t be unlocked after.
They killed support for the first gen Chromecast and the YouTube “app” has been broken for 3+ years. They’ll just stop supporting it one day and you’ll have to buy a new one.
My wife is used to FLauncher and will probably get annoyed if I change the Shield’s interface (again…) but maybe I’ll try it out on the Google TV Chromecast I have for holiday trips.
The dongle still works. They reached market saturation with people who just want a dongle. They can’t realistically be expected to produce these forever.
I mean I’d hope so because eventually this one I have won’t work like the previous one so I’d like a similar product when that happens not this 99 dollar box thing. I guess I hope someone else will continue making cheap dongles I think walmart has their own thing
Most of the appeal of the Chromecast is that it’s a dongle you plug in once and never have to see again. It doesn’t need high performance and 32 gigs of RAM. It needs to play video. That’s its entire purpose. It’s controlled by any phone on your wifi, it doesn’t need a remote.
I think overall it’ll never be able to create quality entertainment.
But Ow! My Balls! isn’t quality entertainment. I’m sure it can create all kinds of clips of things smashing into groins for ultra low-brow entertainment. Probably today.
I feel the original Chromecast was probably the last truly great original Google product, it was simple, it was inexpensive and it worked - you just plugged it in, joined your network and you were off, there really wasn’t anything like it at the time.
Chromecast with Google TV made the “simple” casting worse for some apps like Netflix. Instead of it casting directly, it would spawn the Netflix app and make you use the remote to reselect the show you wanted to see.
I feels like they either badly copy (see Gemini) or don’t think about what they’re offering (see Stadia’s busted business model) they’re content to milk the existing services they’ve already got and make them worse by cramming in more ads (see YouTube, Google’s search result pages) and they cut out or dictate the web through their monopolies (see AMP and Chrome) rather than working with other parties to make good products.
They feel like Hooli in Silicon Valley, basically the definition of a fat tech giant who doesn’t do any innovation of their own.
Tf are you smoking dude, Google has been working on AI long before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. They didn’t release any public models because they wanted to go about it safely and not just dump the world’s best misinformation creator on the open market for anyone to use with little safeguards. All that went out the window when ChatGPT got all the press and google decided they wanted a piece of the hype, but pretending they “didn’t do any innovation of their own” in regards to AI is ludicrous. They have been at the forefront of AI development for the last decade, and the fact you think otherwise shows your only knowledge about AI is from after ChatGPT headlines started coming out.
“Yes I know the customer learned that product name and has a good connotation with it, but how about we change the name to something completely different?”
Back in the day when streaming was cheap as hell and made sense as all things were on Netflix, having a Home Mini with and a Chromecast was bliss.
I used to have a shortcut for the phrase “I’m so tired”, it would start playing Star Trek TNG from Netflix on the Chromecast monitor and it just werked. Saved me from a bad trip once too, I was really uncomfortable on 135ug so in a desperate attempt to hold onto reality I said “alexa…uhmm…uh…hey google play RoboCop” and it just worked.
Only thing is it played the wrong RoboCop (2014) but that only distracted me from spiraling further, like “hold up Samuel L Jackson was in this?”
It feels weird to say but I was a genuinely happy customer. Then the home mini stopped working as well, started triggering by itself, didn’t hear words right, then the Chromecast had trouble updating firmware and rebooting. Then Netflix platformed that douchebag chapelle.
Now all that’s left of it is the pihole I used to block ads for it.
Chromecast naming scheme did get weird - it’s difficult for someone who doesn’t follow these things to know if they want the chromecast ultra or chromecast with google tv. I agree though they should have just called the new product something like “Chromecast Box 2025”.
I think it just means google would stop selling it as the new google TV streamer is up for sale. My Chromecast from 2015 is still working till this day.
Eh, not really. This product had a full run, will continue to work and the features are all still available in their newer products. Killed by Google usually implies they have a service that just ceases to exist.