Still Debating on a Upgrade to the Bolt...Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

Just a word on the speed/hardware: yes; they are different, with the Bolt being snappier in some areas. People report this when using the apps, especially when booting an app up. I see it when rebooting the box, with the Bolt being significantly faster. Day-to-day non-app operation I find the same. For me, and given my limited app use, this wouldn't cause me to move to the Bolt.

 

My cable company has four 4k channels in its guide. They have no signal. If they ever get a signal I will think about 4k. I also have a Mini VOX. I am big, really big, on new stuff. But 4k doesn't get me excited. Maybe when my 1080p dies.

I don't have a Bolt. I do not regret that decision.

 

I have a couple of Bolts, a Roamio Pro that is still being used, along with a Mini VOX and a couple of older Minis. The Roamio is fine to use, the Bolt is a bit faster for things as noted prior. I like having the option to see 4K content, even if only coming from streaming sources, on the 4K TV's that I have in the house so those TVs get the Bolts or the Mini VOX while older TVs get the mini or the Roamio (actually my daughter gets the use of the Roamio so she can record as much content as she wants, and as I think of it, I think she's using the plain Roamio while the Roamio Pro got boxed up and put under the bed in case of an emergency or failure with a bolt).

Were the Bolts worth paying extra to get when I had the Roamios? Tough call for me. I got the first Bolt used from another forum member here or at another site that I sometimes frequent. It was cheap enough total cost to not be too bad and at that point it was the first device that I had that would stream 4K content, or one of the first. That box replaced one of the Roamios (the Pro I think, as I seem to recall having had issues with the Roamio Pro acting up if the drive got too full, suspecting that it had a drive with a bad spot). I intentionally bought a second Bolt because the first was just 4 tuners and I wanted to have at least 6 due to numbers of TVs that were being fed in the household and/or potential conflicts in the recording schedules that everyone had. The last Bolt was a bit spendy to get because it was a top of the line model with All-in service. I debated about going All-in but did it eventually just so I wouldn't get annoyed at the monthly fees that I would have been paying.

I've tended to use the hardware for at least 3 - 4 years per device and eventually I save money with All-in/Lifetime, though again am not a big fan of the upfront cost for that.

I loved the Vox aspect, or should I clarify and say the voice control aspect of having the Bolts vs. the Roamios. You can add the Voice remotes with the Roamios, but then you have to add in the cost to get the voice remotes (which, uh, I did as I bought extra remotes to use with the devices that I have, putting remotes at either end of my living room as an example). Later my friends at Amazon were kind enough to add a voice control for TiVo feature to the Amazon Echo devices that I have, but I have only configured that for one of my TVs/TiVos, and really haven't used that feature much. With that available though, I don't really need the extra Vox remotes and don't think you'd need one to use with a Roamio if you wanted voice operations for same.

Really, in the end it is a case of how much you are willing to spend and what you really expect to get from your purchase. If you don't mind spending the $$ for the Bolt or Bolt+ either is a nice device.

 

My 4k TV handles streaming better than my Roamios or my Bolts.

On the positive side, the UI is significantly faster. Even when I want to watch programs on a Roamio I stream the content to a Bolt because the screens are snappier.

The last two Bolts I bought and the one I returned came with Hydra, but I didn't have any problem taking them back to Encore.

Like most cable companies these days Spectrum(TWC) doesn't have any 4k to record, so that's not a benefit at the present time.

It's a big minus for me that the 2.5" HD means that upgrading the hard drive is problematic.

And I've come to believe that the manufacturing quality of the Bolts is inferior to previous TiVos; two out of the three I've purchased had a hardware problem. One had to be returned due to a weak tuner, and the other would not restart immediately after being powered off, not discovered until too late to correct by returning (because I didn't have occasion to power-cycle it). The problems I've had with previous TiVos only happened after years of use, usually hard disk failures but with a couple of capacitor plague victims along the way.

 

Your 10 year old plasma is 4k?

The faster app loading and UI is nice, but I would not have updated if not one one of those box retirement offers and offsetting the revenue from selling my upgraded roamio.

 

The six-tuner Roamio can transcode four mobile device streams while the Bolt can only do two.
The Roamio can be upgraded to an 8TB drive economically. Larger drives for the Bolt are expensive. and the max size most people use is 3TB.
The six-tuner Roamio has legacy analog outputs built-in while the Bolt does not have analog output capability.

 

The last I saw, the often-recommended replacement 3TB drive for the Bolt could be found for around $130. Not too bad (although a 3TB drive for the Roamio is less).

 

I paid $130 for an 8TB WD Easy Store drive last Thanksgiving at Best Buy. It's a white label drive, but someone on Reddit reported it had the same firmware as the Red drive. It's still working in my Roamio OTA.

 

That's a drive in a backup device, right? If I recall correctly, an issue there was not knowing which bare drive was inside (and WD switched at some point)?

 

Right. It's a gamble, but you can always reassemble the drive and return it if you don't like what model hard drive is inside.