- Comes with a simple remote control which in addition to controlling the AppleTV also allows muting and changing the volume of your TV. As someone who uses my TV exclusively with the AppleTV this means my TV's remote simply sits in a cupboard.
- If you have an iPhone you can use it as a remote over WiFi, I do this all the time to turn off the TV from a room over when the kids need to stop watching. The iPhone can also act as a remote keyboard which can be very convenient for text input.
- The voice search feature works very well in my experience. The remote has a mic in it and you simply hold one button and dictate what you're searching for and 99% of the time for me it works perfectly.
- It's very fast and responsive, allows quick and easy switching between apps.
- It's popular such that any streaming provider probably has an app for it.
Also, Infuse, which is a nice app for playing video files over the network and support Jellyfin, Plex, and others. It also have Dolby and DTS decoders, which works great as the box only have PCM output.
I should note that, when it comes to remote, one downside of Apple TV is that you can have at most one official remote paired to it at the same time. If you want two remotes for convenience, there are some third-party remotes that effectively present themselves as Bluetooth keyboards, but you lose some of the features with them, and they are usually flimsy plastic.
I am an Apple critic that has long bemoaned their practice of trying to lock people into their walled garden.
In the past, I used gaming consoles to stream, which I thought worked well.
I finally, angrily caved and bought an Apple TV because I had an app (LFC TV) that would only stream via AirPlay. After using it for a bit, I have to say I love the thing.
I liked it so much that I bought a second for my other TV.
Reasons:
- Build quality. The remote is machined aluminum and feels like a weapon.
- HDMI CEC implementation. I used HCMI CEC on the consoles I owned, but there was always something that didn't work quite right. The Apple TV seems to nail it on both setups I have YMMV.
- AirPlay. This one makes me a little angry, but if you find a need to stream from an iPhone, the Apple TV is pretty much the only game in town.
AirPlay is a killer feature for me and I love the AppleTVs I have. However, for kids TVs or the TVs that I don't use often, I just get an AirPlay capable 4k Roku stick. They're small, simple and work great as AirPlay receivers.
Lower power consumption, actual 10-foot interface rather than squinting at the TV, lower maintenance, and (depending on your OS of choice) less intrusive OS-level advertising.
I do it with an air mouse keyboard combo[1]. See below, it's in between, it's small like a remote and sucks to type on, but better than selecting letters onscreen.
I tried hooking up a Kodi install to my TV to get decent smart functionality on the old thing. Turns out remote control UI is actually quite hard to get right and all the open source options seem to miss the mark, despite the decades of hard work and best intentions.
With modern smart TVs I don't think you need any external boxes, but if you like to separate the smart from the TV, I don't think there are that many better options than either Apple TV or Chromecast with Android TV, depending on what tech company you'd like to share your data with.
Asides from what the other replies mentioned, various streaming providers have PC streaming platforms that aren't as good as their streaming apps.
I'm currently watching Canadian and world championship curling, and the rights-holder in Canada (TSN) has a website that logs me out between every single game.
Otherwise I watch mostly Plex, and while there is a 10-foot interface (Plex HTPC), for whatever reason it stops my PC from sleeping when content is paused, so I'm forced to use the non-HTPC interface.
When watching TV, people enjoy using a remote to navigate the interface, instead of with keyboard/mouse/trackpad, potentially having to get up and go to the laptop to do that.
