easy to hand off between my phone desktop and the tvs (only matters if you're in the apple eco system), I like the UI much better and apps seem to be update more frequently and to be more stable (this might have changed, I haven't had a roku for years), but for me the big one was that when I went to add a second roku, they wanted a credit card to activate it (I think my old one predated that requirement) - I like as few companies as possible having my credit card number stored and I never was going to spend any money with Roku itself
Funny, I'd guess things have changed since you had one, but I was happy to use Roku's payment system to manage subscriptions. We've only got one steady sub for the TV package we use, but you can add and remove stuff at will and Roku handles it all for you, it's quite slick. Keeps me from having to sign up for multiple different services and - as you say - give my number to multiple providers. Came in quite handy during the playoffs when I was using a different free trial for each round
I was mostly asking about the hardware though - that may not apply here - does Apple have a "cheap" entry level device?
