Just shy of its tenth birthday, Google finally announced thefirst-gen Chromecast has reached the end of its life this week. One of the first mainstream devices designed to accept streams from your phone, tablet, or PC, this dongle helped cement Google’s place in the living room, and built a unique product lineup that still continues to this day.
Launched just thirteen months after the failure of the Nexus Q, the first-gen Chromecast was a complete polar opposite of a product. Priced at an affordable $35, Google’s original dongle was designed with a single purpose in mind: casting from your phone or tablet. It paired nearly perfectly with Google’s other products of that time, especially the second-gen Nexus 7 that held its announcement on the exact same day.
In the decade since, casting has become near ubiquitous — everybody, even iPhone users, knows what it means. The Chromecast family has also expanded over the last ten years, both in scope and in functionality. With two 1080p revisions in 2015 and 2018, a 4K model that became synonymous with Stadia, an audio-only model for streaming to home stereos, and, of course, themost recent Google TV-powered offerings, it’s one product lineup that hasn’t languished throughout the last decade.
How to use Google TV
How to use Google’s version of Plex
In honor of the first-gen Chromecast, I’m curious about which of Google’s streaming products are people currently using. Are you on one of the older Chromecasts that require a phone or laptop to select content? Or have you made the move toGoogle TVand its remote-based UI? To keep things simple, I’m only listing the video-focused ones below — sorry, Chromecast Audio fans — and I’ve paired the 4K and 1080p versions of theGoogle TV model together, as they’re pretty similar. Select all of the units you currently use in your home.
