So I finally caved and bought the new Apple TV. Picked it up Tuesday at lunch, the 32GB one, $149 plus tax, and I've had exactly one week to poke at it. Some thoughts, since apparently that's what this blog is for these days.
Setup itself is quick — hold your iPhone near the box and it pulls your wifi password and Apple ID over automatically, no typing a password letter by letter with a D-pad like it's 2009. That part I'll give them. Took maybe ninety seconds from opening the box to sitting on the new home screen.
The remote is the thing everyone's going to talk about and I get why. Top third is a glass trackpad, and swiping on it to scrub through a show is neat for about a day and then becomes genuinely annoying. I was watching Fargo Wednesday night and went to pause it and instead skipped forward four minutes because my thumb grazed the pad wrong. Did that three separate times over the course of one episode. The remote also has zero grip texture, it's basically a bar of soap with buttons, and I've already watched it slide off the arm of the couch twice. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing you notice every single day, which is worse than a big thing you notice once.
The app store is thinner than I expected
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's not really Apple's fault, or not entirely. There's no Amazon Prime Video app. There's not going to be one anytime soon either — Amazon yanked Apple TV and Chromecast off its store back at the start of October, right before this thing even shipped, specifically because Prime Video isn't on either platform. So if you're an Amazon Prime member, which, who isn't at this point, you're out of luck unless you want to AirPlay it from your phone every time, which defeats the entire point of owning a set-top box.
Universal search (the thing where you ask Siri to find a show and it searches across apps) also doesn't include Netflix yet, which is the app I actually use the most. So I say "find Fargo" into the remote and it shows me iTunes results and Hulu results and nothing from the app I was already sitting in. Mildly infuriating. I know this stuff gets patched over time, tvOS is what, six weeks old at this point, but it makes the whole "universal" branding feel a little premature.
What's actually good, and I didn't expect to like this as much as I do, is Crossy Road. I know, a mobile game port, very exciting, but my nephew was over Sunday and he played it on the TV for forty minutes with the remote turned sideways like a tiny Wiimote and it was the first time in months I've seen a kid actually excited about something happening on our television that wasn't Minecraft. There just aren't many other apps worth mentioning yet. A few TV network apps, HBO NOW, the usual suspects. It feels like day one of an app store, because it is day one of an app store, but I guess I expected more given how long this thing was rumored before it showed up.
One more annoyance and then I'll stop: it charges over Lightning, same cable as an iPhone, but they don't include a wall adapter for it. So the cable just sits there until you steal the block off your phone charger, which means either your phone or your remote is dead at any given moment in this house now. I don't understand why that wasn't a five dollar afterthought in the box.
Overall I don't regret buying it. The hardware feels good, faster than the old one by a mile, and once the app situation catches up (and it will, Apple's very good at making developers show up eventually) I think this becomes the box people actually recommend to their parents. Right now it's a nice piece of hardware running an app store that's still mostly empty shelves, and a remote that keeps sliding into the couch cushions where, I am fairly confident, it currently still is.