Three years in the making, Apple’s fourth generation of Apple TV has finally shipped. It’s arrived with notably more fanfare than previous Apple TVs too, amid claims that this pint-sized set top box will revolutionise the TV space with its new app-driven approach, much more comprehensive integration into the Apple universe, and brand new TV-focussed operating system.
But is the new Apple TV really as ground-breaking as Apple thinks it is? Does it truly drag smart TV kicking and screaming into the 21st century?
To try and answer this question, I’ll be reviewing the Apple TV over two in-depth features. Here: 10 reasons the new Apple TV is a truly compelling product. And follow this link for 10 reasons why the new Apple TV might not be for you.
Reasons You Should Buy An Apple TV
1. tvOS is actually pretty neat
Although it’s certainly not perfect, Apple’s new tvOS is nonetheless startlingly easy to love.
If you own an Apple phone or tablet running iOS 9.1 the love-in starts right away, as the Apple TV can obtain your Wi-Fi password and Apple account information from your portable device via Bluetooth, saving you from the usual tortuous process of using an onscreen keyboard to type in all your details.AppleTVflatAngle
It’s great to find that the rechargeable remote control ships charged too, and that Apple TV does a seamless job of pulling in your movies, music, photos etc with the bare minimum of manual input once it’s got your Apple ID.
I’d argue this instantly makes the Apple TV the most accessible streaming device of choice for technophobes (though obviously up-front installation becomes more of a faff if you’re completely new to the Apple universe).
The slick installation procedure leads to an equally slick and extremely easy-on-the-eye onscreen interface. The almost brutal simplicity of superimposing large, high-resolution icons over a stark white background immediately engages you, especially if you’re already familiar with the look of other Apple device OSes.
Visual cues like the way icons expand when you’ve navigated to them or wobble while you’re holding select over them do a superb job of making you feel like you’re truly in control, and ensure you’re always 100% clear about where you are in the menus.
Everything runs slickly, stably and swiftly too, which is critical to getting users to engage repeatedly with any interface.
The structure of the main home screen is exceptionally intuitive – especially when compared with what feels like the more or less random arrangement of shelves in the latest Android TV interface . The top two rows of the default home screen are the key to its success, with the second row of icons showing the types of content supported by tvOS – movies, TV Shows, apps (including games), photos, and music – and the top row providing direct content links based on the category you’ve selected in the second row.
For instance, select ‘movies’ in the second row and the top row shows large links to films you’ve purchased from Apple’s servers on the left, and a horizontally scrolling list of links to ‘Top Films’ available on iTunes on the right, selected according to current popularity.
Broadly similar approaches are taken for the other default category areas, with everything looking beautiful and benefiting from both lots of useful background information and some impressive ‘joined up thinking’ when it comes to helping you find more content you might be interested in.
For instance, choose a film to watch and you’re taken to an information screen presenting a long row of links to other titles that ‘Viewers Also Watched’, plus such details on the film as a synopsis, its Rotten Tomatoes rating, its running time, its official age certificate, the year it was released, what picture definition it’s available in, and, handily for families, the ‘Common Sense’ website’s recommended minimum viewing age.
Scrolling down brings up cast and crew icons, with you able to jump to other films each person has been involved in at the press of a button.
This all shows that Apple has really thought through ways of helping you find more content – and this same thoughtfulness continues once you’ve settled on something to watch. For instance, while viewing a TV show or movie you can click the touch pad to call up a super-imposed menu providing a synopsis of the film, as well as links to DVD-like chapters.
You can also fast forward or rewind just by sliding your finger left or right on the track pad, while resting your finger on the left or right edge of the track pad lets you jump forwards or backwards 10 seconds.
If you start playing music via the music area of the interface, meanwhile, it keeps playing while you explore other areas right up to the point where a new audio source is fired up. This can be handy for adding music to slideshows.
Direct links to apps you’ve downloaded are initially added to the bottom of the home screen. But crucially you can move any downloaded app you please up into the key second row menu. What’s more, once you do that with an app, it can also do as the original five home screen ‘lead apps’ did and generate direct content links in the top row.
For instance, if you make Netflix one of the five main content links, when you highlight it you get a ‘Popular on Netflix’ list of links on the top ‘shelf’.
The usefulness of the contextual information that appears in the top box is dependent on each developer; with some games it can just be a still photo from the game. But the sort of customisability Apple TV offers is always a great find on modern smart TV platforms.
This is all in truth just a small snapshot of the ways tvOS makes using the Apple TV feel engaging to the point of being genuine fun – and that’s without even mentioning the Siri voice support I’m devoting a separate section to.
It’s questionable whether even tvOS does enough to sell Apple’s belief that apps are the future of TV. But it has at least clearly been a labour of love, delivering major advances over anything any previous Apple TV has done and making on-demand viewing and gaming accessible to just about anyone.
2. It’s truly fun for all the family
One thing that’s become blindingly obvious about Apple TV over the time I’ve been using it is how family friendly it is. Its intuitive design, logical layout, customisability and focus on providing quick access to all your favourite stuff has made it something that both my eight year old daughter and gadget-hating wife have taken to like ducks to water in a way they never have with other similar devices I’ve forced on them.
I’ve actually seen them both sat there with grins on their faces just while they’re exploring the Apple TV menus, for heaven’s sake. And finding out all the little tricks and aids the system offers appears to be more an adventure than the chore it so often is with smart TV interfaces.
Then there are the games. While I think there are issues with the games side of things too, as I’ll cover in the negatives section, there’s no doubt that expanding the concept of ‘casual gaming’ to the family TV screen works surprisingly (to me, anyway) well. Especially – but not exclusively – where there’s some sort of multiplayer action involved. Cue reason three…
3. It’s a better gaming machine than you probably think it is
Cards on the table: As a dedicated console gamer for far too many years, I usually hate ‘casual gaming’. I got into the sort of games you get on phones and tablets briefly – mostly based around Dragonvale – but quickly tired of their simplicity, limited structures and, worst of all, incessant microtransaction pressures.
As a result, the idea of having the family TV taken over by such ‘fluff’ initially filled me with horror. However, three things have at least partly won me over.
First, many of the games available already combine both higher graphical standards and more sophistication than I had anticipated. They actually look rather nice, even on a stupidly over-sized TV.
Second, they deliver their pleasing looks without losing their essential casual accessibility. While this isn’t a great attraction to me, my daughter has for now cast aside her Xbox One joystick to take up the Apple TV remote instead. Even more surprisingly, my usually hostile-to-gaming wife has suddenly start actually using some of the games on Apple TV without any pressure from me.
The third thing that’s made gaming on the Apple TV a surprise hit so far is the way some games support multiplayer options. These games and options are invariably pretty basic, but nonetheless casual family gaming on Apple TV has now become almost as common as family TV viewing in our household in a way it never has before.
The novelty of Apple TV’s take on gaming could wear off over time, and I personally often find myself wishing I could wrestle the family TV back more often for some ‘proper’ games. But it seems undeniable on the evidence of my own pretty regular household that Apple TV makes gaming accessible and to some extent shareable in a way I haven’t seen since the early days of the Nintendo Wii.
4. The remote is a brilliant smart TV interface
Don’t be fooled by its diminutive dimensions and lightweight feel; the new Apple remote is actually a superb way of interfacing with tvOS.
The track pad that sits on the remote’s upper third is comfortably the most effective such pad I’ve used, offering just the right amount of sensitivity and proving almost supernaturally good at knowing how far and how fast you want to make a movement in a game or around the onscreen menus.
The way you click the track pad to select an onscreen option is also judged perfectly, giving you a satisfyingly tactile response while never once during my testing causing you to accidentally move the onscreen selector.
The extent to which Apple has integrated the track pad into the Apple TV’s functionality is exceptional too, especially when it comes to precise tricks like the way gently resting your finger on the left or right side lets you fast forward or rewind what you’re watching by 10 seconds.
I was initially worried that providing just six buttons in the remote’s central portion might prove too limiting. In fact, though, the only buttons I regularly used alongside the track pad were the Menu, Home and Siri voice buttons, and I never felt as if this small combination was a hindrance.
Finally, the way the bottom third of the remote is left blank helps the buttons and track pad fall in the right place when you’re using the remote in standard vertical mode, while also making it easier to hold the remote horizontally in two hands for gaming.
5. Siri actually makes talking to your TV fun
The notion of issuing instructions to your TV by talking to it is hardly new. However, for me Apple TV’s Siri implementation marks the first time such a verbal approach has actually been both useful and fun.
One reason for this is that Siri really is incredibly good at recognising what you say. No matter who was talking to it, it almost always understood us correctly. There’s even a noise-cancelling mic on the remote’s rear so you can be understood against background noise.
It was also a huge relief to find Siri able to interpret instructions correctly even when spoken to in a pretty conversational way. There’s precious little of that thing you get with other voice-recognition AV systems where you have to almost learn another language before they understand what you want.
Siri exhibits an invaluable contextual understanding of your instructions too. For instance, if you’ve called up today’s weather report by just saying ‘what’s the weather’ or something similar, if you then say something like ‘how about tomorrow’, it figures you’re still in weather mode and calls up the weather for tomorrow, without you having to tediously say ‘what is the weather for tomorrow’.
And then, finally, there’s the thought that’s gone into the range of functions Siri can instigate. For instance, as well as ‘Find Brad Pitt movies’ you can say ‘Find good Brad Pitt movies’ (or bad ones) and the TV will draw on Rotten Tomato and iTunes user ratings to filter Mr Pitt’s movies down accordingly. You can also ask for great action films, kids movies, romances… it’s up to you.
You can ask for information on your favourite sports teams, such as when their next game is, how they’re doing in their league, recent form and so on. Or you can ask how the markets are doing, including a specific share price if it’s a very large, well-known company.
You can ask Apple TV to rewind or forward a film by however many hours minutes or seconds you specify. Or if you missed some dialogue saying ‘what did they say’ rewinds the film 10 seconds and automatically brings up temporary subtitles
You can also, of course, use Siri for more general functionality such as ‘open Netflix’, or as a quick way of kicking off content searches.
In fact, one particularly handy thing about Siri search is that it looks beyond Apple apps for its results. So if you search for Hunger Games and you have a Netflix subscription, the Siri result will give you the choice of watching it for free on Netflix or paying to watch it on iTunes.
Siri is of course not perfect; there are limits to what it can do, and you could argue that in some ways it sets up a level of communication that it ultimately can’t completely follow through on. But its thoughtfulness and sensitivity still makes it hands down the only smart TV voice interaction system I’ve ever felt comfortable using.
6. It does some innovative things with its memory
If Apple really wants the future of TV to be apps, then its Apple TV box will likely find itself having to store a good number of those apps over the course of its life. Which could lead to a lot of memory management issues, especially on the cheaper 32GB Apple TV model.
With this in mind it’s interesting to see that Apple is limiting the ‘static size’ of any one app to 200Mb. This means that if an app is bigger than that in its full version, it has to download other parts of itself ‘on demand’. For instance, if a game has multiple levels a developer could set it up so that level three only downloads while you’re playing level two, with level one being deleted to make way for it. Or a racing game could choose to only download a particular track when you select it for play, rather than holding all the tracks permanently in your Apple TV storage.AppleTVAngle
The new Apple TV also auto manages your storage for you, deleting old stuff to make way for new.
These sorts of memory solutions could prove invaluable in delivering the sort of seamless experience Apple is clearly reaching for.
7. App vetting seems to be working
The evidence so far suggests that Apple is going a pretty good job of ensuring that the apps being created for tvOS are nicely optimised both graphically and in interface terms for the Apple TV environment and controls.
I guess it’s early days, when a good first impression needs to be created, so maybe the care currently being shown might slide. But with app developers hopefully taking the view that the most successful tvOS apps will be those that have been best optimised apps for a TV environment, then there’s a good chance the combination of Apple’s tvOS app ‘checking’ and developer care will keep working hand in hand to keep the dross to a minimum.
8. Developer interest seems strong
Connected to point 7, the level of enthusiasm for Apple TV among developers seems high. There’s a striking amount of polish and ambition on show with many of the first apps available for the tvOS platform, suggesting high levels of developer investment, plenty of engagement with Apple when it comes to unlocking the OS’s potential, and some good old-fashioned excitement over a new creative – and revenue – stream.
9. The new Apple TV is finally an Apple product
While we’ve had three previous generations of Apple TV, all of which have done solid to great business, those earlier models have never really felt very ‘Apple’. They haven’t done anything spectacularly innovative, and they haven’t felt especially engaged with other Apple products.
The latest Apple TV changes all this, introducing some genuine innovation, potentially opening up the ‘streaming box’ sector to a much wider audience, and slotting in much more neatly with other Apple products.
10. Plenty of potential
You get the sense with the new Apple TV that there’s much more to come. This obviously includes the likely addition of new key apps – particularly on the video streaming side. But I also expect to see new app creativity now the Apple TV doors have been opened to the app development community, as well as further innovation in the arguably new ‘semi casual’ gaming space Apple TV arguably creates.
I can’t help but wonder how Apple TV might fit into Apple’s HomeKit plans going ahead, too.
Perhaps most importantly of all, for the first time it feels like Apple is truly excited about Apple TV, and has a proper, fully developed vision for it going forward.
But is the new Apple TV really as ground-breaking as Apple thinks it is? Does it truly drag smart TV kicking and screaming into the 21st century?
To try and answer this question, I’ll be reviewing the Apple TV over two in-depth features. Here: 10 reasons the new Apple TV is a truly compelling product. And follow this link for 10 reasons why the new Apple TV might not be for you.
Reasons You Should Buy An Apple TV
1. tvOS is actually pretty neat
Although it’s certainly not perfect, Apple’s new tvOS is nonetheless startlingly easy to love.
If you own an Apple phone or tablet running iOS 9.1 the love-in starts right away, as the Apple TV can obtain your Wi-Fi password and Apple account information from your portable device via Bluetooth, saving you from the usual tortuous process of using an onscreen keyboard to type in all your details.AppleTVflatAngle
It’s great to find that the rechargeable remote control ships charged too, and that Apple TV does a seamless job of pulling in your movies, music, photos etc with the bare minimum of manual input once it’s got your Apple ID.
I’d argue this instantly makes the Apple TV the most accessible streaming device of choice for technophobes (though obviously up-front installation becomes more of a faff if you’re completely new to the Apple universe).
The slick installation procedure leads to an equally slick and extremely easy-on-the-eye onscreen interface. The almost brutal simplicity of superimposing large, high-resolution icons over a stark white background immediately engages you, especially if you’re already familiar with the look of other Apple device OSes.
Visual cues like the way icons expand when you’ve navigated to them or wobble while you’re holding select over them do a superb job of making you feel like you’re truly in control, and ensure you’re always 100% clear about where you are in the menus.
Everything runs slickly, stably and swiftly too, which is critical to getting users to engage repeatedly with any interface.
The structure of the main home screen is exceptionally intuitive – especially when compared with what feels like the more or less random arrangement of shelves in the latest Android TV interface . The top two rows of the default home screen are the key to its success, with the second row of icons showing the types of content supported by tvOS – movies, TV Shows, apps (including games), photos, and music – and the top row providing direct content links based on the category you’ve selected in the second row.
For instance, select ‘movies’ in the second row and the top row shows large links to films you’ve purchased from Apple’s servers on the left, and a horizontally scrolling list of links to ‘Top Films’ available on iTunes on the right, selected according to current popularity.
Broadly similar approaches are taken for the other default category areas, with everything looking beautiful and benefiting from both lots of useful background information and some impressive ‘joined up thinking’ when it comes to helping you find more content you might be interested in.
For instance, choose a film to watch and you’re taken to an information screen presenting a long row of links to other titles that ‘Viewers Also Watched’, plus such details on the film as a synopsis, its Rotten Tomatoes rating, its running time, its official age certificate, the year it was released, what picture definition it’s available in, and, handily for families, the ‘Common Sense’ website’s recommended minimum viewing age.
Scrolling down brings up cast and crew icons, with you able to jump to other films each person has been involved in at the press of a button.
This all shows that Apple has really thought through ways of helping you find more content – and this same thoughtfulness continues once you’ve settled on something to watch. For instance, while viewing a TV show or movie you can click the touch pad to call up a super-imposed menu providing a synopsis of the film, as well as links to DVD-like chapters.
You can also fast forward or rewind just by sliding your finger left or right on the track pad, while resting your finger on the left or right edge of the track pad lets you jump forwards or backwards 10 seconds.
If you start playing music via the music area of the interface, meanwhile, it keeps playing while you explore other areas right up to the point where a new audio source is fired up. This can be handy for adding music to slideshows.
Direct links to apps you’ve downloaded are initially added to the bottom of the home screen. But crucially you can move any downloaded app you please up into the key second row menu. What’s more, once you do that with an app, it can also do as the original five home screen ‘lead apps’ did and generate direct content links in the top row.
For instance, if you make Netflix one of the five main content links, when you highlight it you get a ‘Popular on Netflix’ list of links on the top ‘shelf’.
The usefulness of the contextual information that appears in the top box is dependent on each developer; with some games it can just be a still photo from the game. But the sort of customisability Apple TV offers is always a great find on modern smart TV platforms.
This is all in truth just a small snapshot of the ways tvOS makes using the Apple TV feel engaging to the point of being genuine fun – and that’s without even mentioning the Siri voice support I’m devoting a separate section to.
It’s questionable whether even tvOS does enough to sell Apple’s belief that apps are the future of TV. But it has at least clearly been a labour of love, delivering major advances over anything any previous Apple TV has done and making on-demand viewing and gaming accessible to just about anyone.
2. It’s truly fun for all the family
One thing that’s become blindingly obvious about Apple TV over the time I’ve been using it is how family friendly it is. Its intuitive design, logical layout, customisability and focus on providing quick access to all your favourite stuff has made it something that both my eight year old daughter and gadget-hating wife have taken to like ducks to water in a way they never have with other similar devices I’ve forced on them.
I’ve actually seen them both sat there with grins on their faces just while they’re exploring the Apple TV menus, for heaven’s sake. And finding out all the little tricks and aids the system offers appears to be more an adventure than the chore it so often is with smart TV interfaces.
Then there are the games. While I think there are issues with the games side of things too, as I’ll cover in the negatives section, there’s no doubt that expanding the concept of ‘casual gaming’ to the family TV screen works surprisingly (to me, anyway) well. Especially – but not exclusively – where there’s some sort of multiplayer action involved. Cue reason three…
3. It’s a better gaming machine than you probably think it is
Cards on the table: As a dedicated console gamer for far too many years, I usually hate ‘casual gaming’. I got into the sort of games you get on phones and tablets briefly – mostly based around Dragonvale – but quickly tired of their simplicity, limited structures and, worst of all, incessant microtransaction pressures.
As a result, the idea of having the family TV taken over by such ‘fluff’ initially filled me with horror. However, three things have at least partly won me over.
First, many of the games available already combine both higher graphical standards and more sophistication than I had anticipated. They actually look rather nice, even on a stupidly over-sized TV.
Second, they deliver their pleasing looks without losing their essential casual accessibility. While this isn’t a great attraction to me, my daughter has for now cast aside her Xbox One joystick to take up the Apple TV remote instead. Even more surprisingly, my usually hostile-to-gaming wife has suddenly start actually using some of the games on Apple TV without any pressure from me.
The third thing that’s made gaming on the Apple TV a surprise hit so far is the way some games support multiplayer options. These games and options are invariably pretty basic, but nonetheless casual family gaming on Apple TV has now become almost as common as family TV viewing in our household in a way it never has before.
The novelty of Apple TV’s take on gaming could wear off over time, and I personally often find myself wishing I could wrestle the family TV back more often for some ‘proper’ games. But it seems undeniable on the evidence of my own pretty regular household that Apple TV makes gaming accessible and to some extent shareable in a way I haven’t seen since the early days of the Nintendo Wii.
4. The remote is a brilliant smart TV interface
Don’t be fooled by its diminutive dimensions and lightweight feel; the new Apple remote is actually a superb way of interfacing with tvOS.
The track pad that sits on the remote’s upper third is comfortably the most effective such pad I’ve used, offering just the right amount of sensitivity and proving almost supernaturally good at knowing how far and how fast you want to make a movement in a game or around the onscreen menus.
The way you click the track pad to select an onscreen option is also judged perfectly, giving you a satisfyingly tactile response while never once during my testing causing you to accidentally move the onscreen selector.
The extent to which Apple has integrated the track pad into the Apple TV’s functionality is exceptional too, especially when it comes to precise tricks like the way gently resting your finger on the left or right side lets you fast forward or rewind what you’re watching by 10 seconds.
I was initially worried that providing just six buttons in the remote’s central portion might prove too limiting. In fact, though, the only buttons I regularly used alongside the track pad were the Menu, Home and Siri voice buttons, and I never felt as if this small combination was a hindrance.
Finally, the way the bottom third of the remote is left blank helps the buttons and track pad fall in the right place when you’re using the remote in standard vertical mode, while also making it easier to hold the remote horizontally in two hands for gaming.
5. Siri actually makes talking to your TV fun
The notion of issuing instructions to your TV by talking to it is hardly new. However, for me Apple TV’s Siri implementation marks the first time such a verbal approach has actually been both useful and fun.
One reason for this is that Siri really is incredibly good at recognising what you say. No matter who was talking to it, it almost always understood us correctly. There’s even a noise-cancelling mic on the remote’s rear so you can be understood against background noise.
It was also a huge relief to find Siri able to interpret instructions correctly even when spoken to in a pretty conversational way. There’s precious little of that thing you get with other voice-recognition AV systems where you have to almost learn another language before they understand what you want.
Siri exhibits an invaluable contextual understanding of your instructions too. For instance, if you’ve called up today’s weather report by just saying ‘what’s the weather’ or something similar, if you then say something like ‘how about tomorrow’, it figures you’re still in weather mode and calls up the weather for tomorrow, without you having to tediously say ‘what is the weather for tomorrow’.
And then, finally, there’s the thought that’s gone into the range of functions Siri can instigate. For instance, as well as ‘Find Brad Pitt movies’ you can say ‘Find good Brad Pitt movies’ (or bad ones) and the TV will draw on Rotten Tomato and iTunes user ratings to filter Mr Pitt’s movies down accordingly. You can also ask for great action films, kids movies, romances… it’s up to you.
You can ask for information on your favourite sports teams, such as when their next game is, how they’re doing in their league, recent form and so on. Or you can ask how the markets are doing, including a specific share price if it’s a very large, well-known company.
You can ask Apple TV to rewind or forward a film by however many hours minutes or seconds you specify. Or if you missed some dialogue saying ‘what did they say’ rewinds the film 10 seconds and automatically brings up temporary subtitles
You can also, of course, use Siri for more general functionality such as ‘open Netflix’, or as a quick way of kicking off content searches.
In fact, one particularly handy thing about Siri search is that it looks beyond Apple apps for its results. So if you search for Hunger Games and you have a Netflix subscription, the Siri result will give you the choice of watching it for free on Netflix or paying to watch it on iTunes.
Siri is of course not perfect; there are limits to what it can do, and you could argue that in some ways it sets up a level of communication that it ultimately can’t completely follow through on. But its thoughtfulness and sensitivity still makes it hands down the only smart TV voice interaction system I’ve ever felt comfortable using.
6. It does some innovative things with its memory
If Apple really wants the future of TV to be apps, then its Apple TV box will likely find itself having to store a good number of those apps over the course of its life. Which could lead to a lot of memory management issues, especially on the cheaper 32GB Apple TV model.
With this in mind it’s interesting to see that Apple is limiting the ‘static size’ of any one app to 200Mb. This means that if an app is bigger than that in its full version, it has to download other parts of itself ‘on demand’. For instance, if a game has multiple levels a developer could set it up so that level three only downloads while you’re playing level two, with level one being deleted to make way for it. Or a racing game could choose to only download a particular track when you select it for play, rather than holding all the tracks permanently in your Apple TV storage.AppleTVAngle
The new Apple TV also auto manages your storage for you, deleting old stuff to make way for new.
These sorts of memory solutions could prove invaluable in delivering the sort of seamless experience Apple is clearly reaching for.
7. App vetting seems to be working
The evidence so far suggests that Apple is going a pretty good job of ensuring that the apps being created for tvOS are nicely optimised both graphically and in interface terms for the Apple TV environment and controls.
I guess it’s early days, when a good first impression needs to be created, so maybe the care currently being shown might slide. But with app developers hopefully taking the view that the most successful tvOS apps will be those that have been best optimised apps for a TV environment, then there’s a good chance the combination of Apple’s tvOS app ‘checking’ and developer care will keep working hand in hand to keep the dross to a minimum.
8. Developer interest seems strong
Connected to point 7, the level of enthusiasm for Apple TV among developers seems high. There’s a striking amount of polish and ambition on show with many of the first apps available for the tvOS platform, suggesting high levels of developer investment, plenty of engagement with Apple when it comes to unlocking the OS’s potential, and some good old-fashioned excitement over a new creative – and revenue – stream.
9. The new Apple TV is finally an Apple product
While we’ve had three previous generations of Apple TV, all of which have done solid to great business, those earlier models have never really felt very ‘Apple’. They haven’t done anything spectacularly innovative, and they haven’t felt especially engaged with other Apple products.
The latest Apple TV changes all this, introducing some genuine innovation, potentially opening up the ‘streaming box’ sector to a much wider audience, and slotting in much more neatly with other Apple products.
10. Plenty of potential
You get the sense with the new Apple TV that there’s much more to come. This obviously includes the likely addition of new key apps – particularly on the video streaming side. But I also expect to see new app creativity now the Apple TV doors have been opened to the app development community, as well as further innovation in the arguably new ‘semi casual’ gaming space Apple TV arguably creates.
I can’t help but wonder how Apple TV might fit into Apple’s HomeKit plans going ahead, too.
Perhaps most importantly of all, for the first time it feels like Apple is truly excited about Apple TV, and has a proper, fully developed vision for it going forward.
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