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amatechaHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting …

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the product, nor NVIDIA's online product page, indicated that an Android account is strictly required to actually use the product. I ended up doing some more searching after returning the product, and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it. Gotta love it...

Original discussionMy daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account476 source comments · at import
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capybara_2020HN

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devices. With strong safe guards around that account and an actually support system.

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visargaHN

> and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it That's the kind of results Google should be surfacing, but it lost the game, it is so useless now for precision searching.

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tacker2000HN

I was looking at a media center/gaming emulation device and to be honest i dont see the benefit of these android based TV devices or Apple TV anymore. You can buy a good mini-pc for a couple hundred bucks and its much more powerful and flexible. You can run windows or linux etc and hook up any keyboard, controller, remote, and do whatever you like.

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DuwensatzajHN

Good for you. Nvidia Shield was great, but they upgraded the user interface and shat ads all over it.

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sp332HN

This is probably not a helpful answer for most people, but the Shield has an unlocked bootloader, and it's popular enough to have lots of custom ROMs that you could flash that don't have that problem.

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