[Dark_Slayer]

Other possible hardware improvements? Well... Ok maybe we can't up the cpu, but why ditch the sd slot? Things like that are useful. And how about a bit more storage? 16gb isn't reaaalllly a whole lot.

And please don't say 'just buy the 500 then' because thats a different price point.

Question, Always-on, very cool that it can control the home.. I wldnt have much use for it, I tend to live in a more traditional environment... But is this to say... Tv must be on for Google voice response to be heard? (through tv speaker)

The remote should have been included but it wasn't. For the holidays last year they were bundling the remote, even at that magical $150 price point from AMZN. While it's not as optimal, many people will buy the gamepad and remote from eBay, so if they aren't valuable to you reselling is a good option. I know several who purchased the $150 deal from Amazon last year and sold the gamepad for $35, making their bottom line $115 with remote

A little more storage would have been nice, but actually don't buy the 500GB. It's nearly useless and you'll have worse performance with its hybrid OS drive. Spend the difference in cost between the 16GB and pro on a USB3.0 drive. If you are like many old time Kodi users you may have a good SSD that you replaced with an m2 drive, a USB enclosure pairs nicely. Whichever way, "adopting" a USB drive through the adoptable storage option gives much better performance than saddling yourself with the lower overall performance of the 500 GB model

Speaking of ... adoptable USB3.0 is much greater overall than the SD card options, removing that slot was best

The mic for the always on assistant is supposed to be in the gamepad, but I am not sure if the TV speakers need to be on or if the Nvidia "spot" speakers will playback your response for you