I have a second generation Chromecast on an old TV that only does 1080p. I’m fine with that, I don’t care about the resolution. Someone told me that I might like the new one with Google TV, but I don’t know much about it. I pretty much just cast from apps on my phone, so I’m not sure if there’s any reason to upgrade. The only thing I don’t like is sometimes the Chromecast icon doesn’t show up and I have to restart the app, but I doubt that’s on the Chromecast end.
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with what I have, but I’ve been looking at comparison websites and they aren’t really telling me what I need to know, which is if I’m missing something good I shouldn’t be missing.
Also, this is not really important, but I’m on Chrome and Google thinks “Chromecast” is a misspelling.
I went from generation 1 to 2 only when apps refused to work.
The 3. Generation doesn’t do any features different for me.
I’ve had some issues with temperature shutdowns and unreachability on all of them, maybe not so much on 3. genenation. It may be the cause of your issue, but I’m not sure.
I mostly had that issue on gen.2 but I’ve also swapped phones and moved my WiFi in between so I’m not sure. When I had gen.2 on our primary TV, it would fall out after many (8+) hours, at which point the dongle would be smoking hot. I could usually fix it by cooling it (waving it out the window 😃 )but eventually I upgraded to gen.3 and haven’t had that issue since then.