alt Hacker NewsMy dad is extremely irritated with Android TVs as a concept. He just wants to watch something and complains about it taking a few minutes on startup to even show the screen where can can select YouTube.
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
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To his credit, there's no technical reason that a processor running tens of billions of instructions per second couldn't immediately respond to menu inputs on the next frame.
Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.
At least show him how to use SmartTube, that will improve his experience by a lot.
Modern TVs use a max of 5 watts on standby. Does he think it's higher? Maybe a watt-meter plug is a simple solution (or it may make him obsess about the power usage when turned on!)
Your dad is right to not understand that. There is zero reason for any appliance to take longer than a second to turn on from zero power. Even complex systems can use fast boot techniques (i.e. hybernation) to power on quickly without any power draw while idle. All it takes is developers who care and/or consumers who demand better.