Google Needs an Apple TV (Premium)

I took another look at the inexpensive Chromecast with Google TV this past week and it’s still a bit underpowered for my tastes. In this case, you really do get what you pay for, but I’d like to pay more to get more. And that more should be in the form of a more powerful set-top box that resembles the Apple TV.

As a long-time fan and user of services like Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, YouTube Music, and the like, Google has long played a major role in my life, albeit one that’s been secondary to Microsoft for productivity and secondary to Amazon, Apple, Sonos, and other companies in entertainment and other forms of content consumption like reading. But 2023 was an interesting year for many reasons, among them that I’ve amped up my use of Google products and services in the past few months in ways that I didn’t see coming. I recently wrote about a major component of this shift in All-In on Pixel (Premium), but there’s more to it than that. This isn’t just about mobile devices and related hardware. More broadly, it’s about where I choose to spend my time for both work and play.

Ironically, this shift started in a year in which Google hasn’t always looked that great. In addition to stumbling badly, twice, in the face of Microsoft’s AI onslaught, the online giant is beset by antitrust issues here and abroad related to business practice abuses in the various markets it dominates. And Google even made my life harder by suddenly removing the extra paid storage feature that I relied on for my photos and document archives storage. (It was a lot like Google One but for managed Google Workspace accounts.) I wrote about that latter issue in Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts, Again (Premium).

But if there is a silver lining to that latter issue, it’s that it forced me to (at least partially) undergo the online account shift I had attempted back in September but then gave up on because of its difficulty: I had wanted to move my personal accounts and data---personal documents, Photos, YouTube, YouTube Music, and so on---from my Google Workspace account to my personal Gmail account but had kept running into roadblocks. And there are still roadblocks, as I still use my Workspace account for YouTube and YouTube Music. But my other data---personal and work documents and the archives, plus our photo collection in Google Photos---are completely moved over to Gmail, which now has a 2 TB Google One subscription attached to it.

The work documents bit was key among the surprises of the past few months: Thanks to the escalating enshittification of OneDrive in Windows 11, I moved to Google Drive. First tentatively, with a subset of my day-to-day work files, and then fully, as I moved over all of my work and work-related storage to Google Drive, including my books. I haven’t yet, but I could disable OneDrive in Windows 11 right now and get on with my life quite happily. (I won’t actually do that f...