A few people wanted me to share my thoughts on the new Apple TV. I’d ordered mine opening day but oddly they were available for purchase at Best Buy before mine even got shipped out. The short review is that the product feels rushed. Lots of missing features that will likely get added over the next few weeks. Rather than a real review here are short thoughts on various points.

Text entry is if anything worse than everyone was reporting. After setting up my Apple ID and Netflix I’m simply shocked that Apple let this go out without Bluetooth keyboard support or the Apple Remote app. Fortunately most of the reviews were a bit misleading how much you had to type. I only had to enter my Apple ID password in twice and then the Netflix email and password once.

Most of the other apps don’t have you login via typing on the Apple TV. They simply put up a passcode and a short website you go to enter it in. You use your laptop or iPad to do this. No typing via the Apple TV. A lot of the reviews weren’t clear on this making it seem like they were typing all their passwords via the Apple TV text entry screen. I’m glad they were wrong. Honestly it now works vastly superior to the old Apple TV. Before channels didn’t all work the same way. This time they mostly followed how ESPN behaved in the old Apple TV for activation. I entered in about 15 channels and it went quickly. The only problem I had was a bug in the NBC app that kept bringing up an error after a second on the passcode screen. However if you remember the passcode and type it on your laptop it works fine. I do wish there was a single logon for all your cable accounts. I’m not sure how Apple could do that. In any case it’d require the cooperation of all the cable services which is pretty unlikely. I’m just glad the process has improved over the old Apple TV. (And far more channels too)

I don’t find the remote nearly as badly designed as many. I do think asymmetry would be better but it’s not nearly as big a deal as most are saying. I’m not sure the touchpad is as big a deal as Apple thinks though. In some ways the old way of moving with buttons was superior. I suspect my fingers would get sore quickly dragging as opposed to just clicking a button. Fortunately you can still program your own remote.

Games a bit underwhelming right now. I’m sure more will be coming. The ones I’m looking forward to the most are MAME type games. There’s a Disney Infinity 3.0 demo up right now that’s quite good. There’s supposed to be a version with the new hardware. No word on that.  Unfortunately most Games are getting very bad reviews. Disney Infinity is among the worst. This is presumably due to people using the remote as controller and getting frustrated. I think Apple blew it by not allowing controller only games. With many games they are basically unplayable with the remote. I suspect they’re blaming the app developer for the bad controls even though it’s a requirement by Apple. 

The app store reviews are less useful than you’d imagine. You can see the review score but you can’t read the reviews as on the iOS or OS X app stores. That’s mainly because there’s no way to really write a review. (I shudder trying to imagine trying to write a long review with Apple’s controller) That’s annoying as then you can’t figure out whether you can discount 5 star or 1 star reviews from idiots. Since there’s no text you just see a bunch of one star and two star reviews with no context — although I suspect most of the bad reviews for say Disney Infinity come from trying to play a game designed for a complex controller with a simple remote. Were I a game developer I’d be pretty pissed.

The remote really is horrible for games. For many of them I found myself wishing I could use the regular remote (with buttons) as a controller. (You can’t with any games I tried including Crossy Road) Fortunately the controller Apple pushes, the Steel Nimbus, is a very nice controller. Far better than my 360 in terms of feel. Games play much better with it. I was particularly impressed with Rayman. After playing games with the controller I’m even more convinced Apple made a huge mistake not allowing controller only games. Overall I’d say that in capabilities and graphics it’s vastly superior for gaming to the Xbox 360. I’ve not played with an Xbox One or PS4 so I don’t know how it compares there. I can see a lot of 360 games getting ported if it’s not too hard. (No idea on that angle)

The springboard (icon list) is much more configurable than in the past. You just hold down the button to move to an edit mode. You can move icons around or delete them (via the play button when in shaky mode) This is pretty intuitive and similar to iOS. You can move apps to and from the home row (top row). Hurray. I hated that you couldn’t move the iTunes Store movie and TV icons in the old Apple TV. I moved the iTunes Store and App Store buttons to the bottom since I’ll use them only occasionally.

One thing I wish it had was a shortcut to areas on my iTunes libraries. I wish I could have an icon for my music and an icon for my movies. Right now, as in the old Apple TV, you click on computers, select the computer running iTunes, and then drill down.

I can’t figure out how to get my photo selections to display in the screen saver the way it worked on my old Apple TV. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. This might have something to do with deprecating iPhoto and Aperture in preference to Photos. I’d converted my library to Photos but it didn’t carry over all my albums. More growing pains.

By default playlists for movies are turned off. You go to the AppleTV settings to turn playlists on for everything and not just music. Playlists for movies are a life saver if you have a lot of movies. I usually put the shows I want to watch the next few weeks in one. Alas there’s still no way to have a playlist that mixes TV shows and movies. (Say for a Marvel playlist)

As with Apple Music on iOS and OS X the UI feels unfinished with lots of little annoyances. The big annoyance is not having Siri. That said your playlists all show up. I usually make those in iTunes and just play them through my stereo. Apple Music For You works just as good as on iOS. This is probably my favorite feature of Apple Music as the suggested playlists are for me nearly always great.¹

None of the games I tried allowed music play through from Apple Music in the background. This kind of sucks and is a common feature on iOS games. I don’t know if this is a limit in tvOS by Apple or just the developers. Hopefully this is fixed in an upcoming version.

There is no podcast app. I figured Apple would port its own podcast app but they didn’t. The old Apple TV had a podcast section where you could stream podcasts you might not wish to subscribe to. While I didn’t listen to podcasts regularly on my Apple TV I did do it occasionally – especially video podcasts. Now if you use iTunes for your podcasts on OS X then they still show up under computer. Since I use Downcast I didn’t have any any podcasts in iTunes. This is probably a minor point since I suspect most people play podcasts while in the car or exercising. Still it was a surprise.

Internet radio isn’t available standard anymore either. I rarely used this so I didn’t miss it. There were quiet a few internet radio apps in the app store. I didn’t try them out. I bring this up because I saw a few people complaining. They are there.

There no easy way to clear the search field when you want to search for something new. You have to scroll to the right and click the backspace repeatedly. That’s idiotic. It’s made worse by just how big a pain it is to type with the remote. 

As you might expect the quality of apps in the app store is mixed. Some of the apps make no sense to be on a TV. Seriously, wait times for Disneyland? I suspect that the app store will, as with the iOS and OS X apps, have a lot of crap mixed in with the good apps. Contra some I’m not sure that’s Apple’s fault. I do wish we could order apps for the Apple TV from iTunes and simply have the device download them. This is how I used to order most of my iOS apps. This would also make it easier to link to apps from a web page. Right now some apps are universal. (Buying them for iOS provides them for tvOS as well) Not all are. From a developer’s perspective you’re probably much better off making your apps universal. 

Getting to the hardware it is pretty much like the old Apple TV only taller. My only real complaint is that I really wish it had optical audio. I ended up getting a splitter from Amazon as I got an expensive receiver just before receivers all came with HDMI standard. I know I’m not alone in that. The CEC feature that allows you to control volume from the Apple remote worked great for me with my 2 year old Samsung TV. I know CEC isn’t exactly the most reliable standard though. So even if your device supports it doesn’t mean it’ll work well. Thus far I’ve had no trouble though.

Supporting bluetooth headphones is very nice. It lets me watch a movie late at night without waking the kids.

Overall, despite the criticisms, I really like the device. Everything is much faster and more fluid than before. The biggest gripes come with text entry. This makes everything much harder than it should be. Because of all the entry issues the device really feels worse than it is. However I suspect more widespread use of Siri as well better text entry will be coming. I’m sure Apple’s been stung by the near universal criticism on this point. A lot of the strengths of the device also really depend upon developers making good use of it. While I think six months from now things will be much better, right now the pickings are more slender than one would hope.