You certainly can’t accuse Apple any more of treating its Apple TV as a mere hobby. Since the 4th-Gen Apple TV launched last November sporting its shiny new tvOS interface it’s already received no less than three firmware updates: 9.1, 9.1.1 and, following Apple’s big launch event on Monday March 21, 9.2.
While the first two updates were predominantly ‘backgrounders’, designed to fix bugs and tweak performance, 9.2 introduces a quartet of what look on the surface to be fairly substantial new features: Folders, iCloud photo playback, Bluetooth keyboard support, and enhancements to the Siri voice recognition/control system.
I’m going to be exploring these features in more detail for the rest of this page, so if you just want to find out why I don’t believe the improvements get anywhere near to solving Apple TV’s core problems, skip to page two.
Folders
With Apple now claiming more than 5,000 apps for its latest Apple TV and many Apple TV users’ home pages creaking under the weight of endless rows of app icons, many users will welcome the introduction of folders to the Apple TV experience like a long lost friend.
To set up a folder you first have to move the onscreen cursor over an app and then click and hold down the remote’s touchpad until the app icon starts to wobble. Then you move the selected app icon over the icon of another app you want your first app to share a folder with. Hold the first app over the second one for a moment and the Apple TV will automatically create a folder containing both the app you first chose and the second app you hovered over.
Assuming there’s some logic to your app selection Apple TV will even generate a text name for the new folder. For instance, putting Rayman Adventures in a folder with Beat Sports will generate a Games folder name. You can, though, relabel any folder you create just by scrolling up to the folder name and using the onscreen keyboard.
Siri improvements
Also helping you cope with the huge number of apps now available on Apple TV are two updates to the Siri voice recognition system. First, you can now use Siri to ask Apple TV to look for a specific app in the app store. Previously Siri could only search through apps you’d already downloaded and installed.
Handily you don’t even have to first enter the App Store for the Siri search to work. You can just say, for example, “Find Sparkle in the App Store’, and Siri should bring up a link to anything relevant (the Sparkle 2 app in the example I just gave).
The other Siri improvement enables you to dictate terms for both search fields and username/password fields. This really does make universal searches and app set up procedures much less onerous, as well as reducing the amount of device juggling you have to do when trying to connect with other Apple and Bluetooth devices.
While you simply speak the words you want to input into a search field, for passwords you dictate each letter/number/symbol individually, adding ‘Capital’ before any letter that needs to be upper case.
Bluetooth keyboard support
Apple hasn’t just improved text input via Siri, though. The tvOS 9.2 update also introduces Bluetooth keyboard support. Apple inevitably says you should use an Apple Bluetooth keyboard, but in truth pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard should work - and no longer having to wrestle with the horrendous tedium of onscreen keyboards really is a joy.
iCloud Photo Library playback
The last main feature the tvOS 9.2 introduces is playback of photos from your iCloud Photo Library and playback of Live Photos from the latest iPhones. Prior to the new firmware’s arrival the Photo app on the new Apple TV only handled pictures from My Photo Stream and Shared Photo Streams. The latest update also supports iCloud videos as well as retaining your iCloud photo album and favorite groupings.
There are other minor tweaks introduced with tvOS 9.2 too. The presentation of the app switcher (where double pressing the remote's TV button brings up a screen in which you can swiftly switch between recently opened apps) has been improved. Also the way you can swipe forward and back through video has been tweaked; you now have to pause playback before using swipe to skip through a video. The addition of the mandatory pause takes a little getting used to, but certainly reduces the instances of accidental video shifting.
There’s no question that the features introduced by tvOS 9.2 make the 4th-generation Apple TV more intuitive and fun to use by tackling the most cumbersome parts of the original interface.
However, you can’t help but think that really all of tvOS 9.2’s new features should have been present when the 4th-gen Apple TV launched. Indeed, some of the ‘new’ features were actually present on previous generations of Apple TV! So let’s not pretend that Apple is breaking any true new ground with its latest tweaks.
What exactly is Apple TV?
Significantly more troubling, though, is just how ‘peripheral’ the new tvOS features are. They just address the surface of the Apple TV experience without getting anywhere near the heart of what I believe to be Apple TV’s main issue: that Apple still doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants the new Apple TV to be.
While previous generations of Apple TV didn’t benefit from the same sort of firmware aftercare that the 4th-gen box seems to be getting, they were at least refreshingly simple and focused in their approach. They essentially just wanted to be an elegantly interfaced bridge for streaming video from online services or media from your other Apple devices into your TV.
The introduction of tvOS, though, while certainly greatly expanding what Apple TV can do, seems to me to have led to an uncomfortable lack of focus and identity. The new Apple TV now feels like it’s simultaneously trying to be a video streamer, a games console, a user content portal, an extension of your iPhone, a home control device and a hub for all your other Apple devices. And in trying to be all things to all men, it’s ended up becoming something that I struggle to find much use for at all.
App attack
The fact that Apple has felt the need to introduce folders to an Apple TV for the first time, for instance, merely highlights one of the identity issues the new Apple TV has. After all, folders have been introduced to help people cope with the huge amount of apps available to Apple TV. Yet the fact is that most households simply do not want to have access to thousands of apps on their TV. They just want a handful of apps that give them features that actually feel useful on a TV.
TVs represent both a more passive and a more shared (less personal) form of entertainment than smartphones and tablets - something I used to feel that Apple understood. Now, though, it seems as if Apple thinks we want our TVs to play host to a vast app market when in fact for many TV users the 5,000 apps Apple now claims for Apple TV just represent mountains of tedious clutter.
After all, wherever you have 5,000 apps you’re going to have a lot of dross. And while sorting through this dross on a personal, touch-screen device like a smartphone or tablet might seem tolerable, on a shared TV it is not.
What makes a TV app?
Also problematic in trying to define a useful identity for Apple TV is the fact that the majority of the apps being delivered for tvOS are merely glammed up ports of apps designed for smartphones. Which means most of them make no compelling case for their presence on the screen of a home’s main TV.
This is especially the case where games are concerned. My TVs over the years have played host to all manner of visually spectacular, huge and complex video games across many generations of serious games consoles. Yet now Apple TV expects me to be excited that I can use my 4K, 65-inch TV to play Crossy Road?
When the specs for the latest Apple TV were revealed some - including some of Forbes’ specialist video game writers - thought there was genuine potential for it to become a new games console. But a lack of conviction and clarity about its gaming abilities means that for the most part it’s become little more than a glorified iPhone where gaming is concerned. And frankly if I want to play iPhone games I’d rather play them on my iPhone.
Stand and deliver - video
In fact, the most useful thing about the half-baked gaming abilities of the latest Apple TV is that they make it clearer than ever that the foremost duty of any ‘connected smart TV box’ should surely be to deliver video streaming services.
The Apple TV does OK in this regard, I guess, if you’re fully signed up to Apple’s content eco system. But it’s hard not to feel doubly miffed about the appearance of thousands of simplistic games in the tvOS store when the latest Apple TV doesn’t yet carry the Amazon Video streaming app.
Had Apple managed to pull together its own much talked about streaming TV platform the new Apple TV might have felt more satisfying as a deliverer of video content. As it stands, though, it again fails to carve out a distinctive identity for itself as a way of getting video into your TV. Especially as unlike key rivals it doesn’t offer any 4K/UHD streaming support.
The competition
Talking of rivals, I guess you could argue that these too fall foul of some of the problems I believe the Apple TV has. However, I don’t think such an argument really holds up. Roku’s platform, for instance, is vastly more focused on being a video streaming service, offering a huge selection of video options. The Amazon Fire TV’s interface, meanwhile, while not nearly as sophisticated as Apple TV’s, is much simpler and more focused on video - and both the Roku 4 and Amazon Fire TV support 4K/UHD streaming.
The (admittedly more expensive) Nvidia Shield, meanwhile, also offers 4K streaming but significantly combines its solid video streaming app support with a genuine, PC-grade video gaming platform. So it too has a defined identity suited to a TV environment.
Compared with all of these devices, the latest Apple TV’s lack of focus and a true identity stands out like a sore thumb.
It’s easy to see how we got here, mind you. After all, initially the notion that the new tvOS interface would enable Apple TV to integrate much more completely into the wider Apple eco system looked pretty sweet. Indeed, it could have worked out very well if Apple had only kept a firm grip on what most (though obviously not all) households want from a smart TV experience.
While the extent of the tvOS 9.2 update seems almost laughably slight in the context of the latest Apple TV’s much deeper issues, I still think Apple TV has potential. A firm decision from Apple as to what it truly wants Apple TV to be, along with careful curation of more truly TV-centric apps and more effort in making sure those apps ‘float to the top’ of the now vast app sea could quickly make a difference. Especially when this improved focus is harnessed to Apple TV’s genuinely innovative user interface.
As the Apple TV stands today, though, it falls into the same sort of philosophical trap that the Android TV platform (reviewed here) does: namely that it seems to think people want their TV to be an extension of their smartphones when that’s actually the last thing most households - especially those with more than one smartphone! - are really after.
For more thoughts on the latest Apple TV check out:
10 Reasons You Should Buy An Apple TV
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