For Late Adopters: Older Roku Owners, Please Buy This Remote
I had first-generation Roku, which was a great sell at the time. Take your aging TV, potentially with no HDMI much less ethernet or Wi-Fi, and get this device for less than $100 and now you can stream Netflix and most other services except for Apple/iTunes. Chromecast and other devices were similar but the Roku was just a very straightforward value proposition when it first came out and they sold tons of them.
But the upgrade cycle for Roku has never been very clear in terms of how long they should remain functional or when it’s just worth it to get a new one. It would be great to see them embrace some kind of trade-in program as other hardware makers have, especially if some apps are not going to be supported on older models in the future.
When my first-generation Roku started to crash a lot and just act buggy, I upgraded to a newer Roku without much hesitation. While you can access Netflix on almost any connected device, including even Comcast’s X1 cable box which my parents have, the user interface for watching Netflix on a Blu-Ray player or even a smart TV is generally so bad I just prefer the Roku UI. For example, my parents just got a new “smart” TV, but setting it up on Wi-Fi or ethernet is in no way intuitive to people who are just used to using a cable box, then you have to authenticate whatever accounts…
