Anybody besides me hate the white background

[tmoenter]

The old black background was easy on the eyes. The new white background glares in a darkened room. I hate it!!! How about a configurable option...

BTW I also hate the new remote due to overshoot of the touchpad. Exacerbates the crappy text entry in a straight line. And Siri is not helpful at all for my home sharing library searches.

I will be returning the unit to Apple. First Apple product in 31 years that I have sent back as half-baked. Steve would never have let this thing see the light of day.

 

[normanfox]

don't worry, the next tvOS version in next year will allow background options.

 

[2010mini]

You made a new thread just to rant?

I feel your pain, but there have been countless threads here and other forums that have said Siri doesn't search shared libraries.

Siri has ALWAYS been sandboxed to the device it is on. You were never able to use Siri on your iPad/iPhone to search your shared library either. Siri only searches the device and the web. Not other devices.

 

[Rigby]

Siri has ALWAYS been sandboxed to the device it is on. You were never able to use Siri on your iPad/iPhone to search your shared library either. Siri only searches the device and the web. Not other devices.

Siri on an iPhone also can't search the Netflix app while the Apple TV version can, so that's not an argument. Implementing Siri search for homesharing libraries should be very simple for Apple since the search APIs already exist and the Computers app loads an index of the shared library anyway. There is no excuse.

 

[TrueBlou]

The old black background was easy on the eyes. The new white background glares in a darkened room. I hate it!!! How about a configurable option...

BTW I also hate the new remote due to overshoot of the touchpad. Exacerbates the crappy text entry in a straight line. And Siri is not helpful at all for my home sharing library searches.

I will be returning the unit to Apple. First Apple product in 31 years that I have sent back as half-baked. Steve would never have let this thing see the light of day.

There's always the possibility that they will expand the Siri features in their own services. After all, they are opening up the api to be used by everyone early next year it would be bad form if they didn't improve their own. But you can never second guess Apple.

I've found now that I'm used to the touch pad and text input it's not as bad as I first thought. I just do a big swipe to get near to the letter I want, then tap the edges of the pad to move one space at a time like a standard input device.

But it has been a surprisingly big departure from Apple this time out. I think because they didn't do their usual gradual changes and instead just jumped in the deep end its left a few issues that definitely need working out.

 

[nperei]

Yes white background does made it hard to see it. I'm sure next TVos will let us change background just like watchOS add photo for facelift. I hope so.
I love it all expect for white.

 

[TrueBlou]

Yes white background does made it hard to see it. I'm sure next TVos will let us change background just like watchOS add photo for facelift. I hope so.
I love it all expect for white.

I actually like the white, but I'm surprised considering Apple is usually good with accessibility features that they didn't offer a dark background option. Hopefully it's something they add.

You could always submit a feature request on the Apple website for it. The more folk who do, the more likely they are to implement it.

 

[tmoenter]

If nothing else, I'd like to see Siri understand the letters of the alphabet as a keyboard replacement. That wouldn't be hard to do. Doesn't require local search. It would be fantastic to jump long menu lists to programs that start with the letter "T" for example. Save lots of scrolling. If you could type by voice it would help a lot when entering text for logins and such.

My complaints largely are that they rushed this thing out half-baked. In Steve's time, Apple was much more thorough. Cook just isn't a Jobs-style perfectionist.... or he doesn't innately know in his gut what makes sense for the end user. Before Steve died, the story was that he had "cracked the code" on the TV user experience. So far I have seen no evidence that that crack code is being delivered by the ATV product. Still too many warts.

 

[Mac... nificent]

I have spoken to several people who have mentioned that they didn't like the white background. Disappointed that Apple doesn't allow for other selections.

 

[iBighouse]

They need to allow for user choice on the background. In settings there should be a color selector that allows for any color, and the default white/black option. Heck were I in charge I would also allow for a color changing option similar to what Hue disco does with moods for my hue lighting. The color clashes would be wonderful.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Yes. It's awful and shows the worst of Apple.

Great design is way more than looks and they have really screwed the pooch on ATV4's usability with the remote and the wrong color scheme for most TV environments and situations.

 

[laurim]

I didn't think I would like it but there's enough grey in it to not make it too hard for me to look at in the dark. Maybe people sit a lot closer than I do. I design graphics for huge LED walls so I'm particularly sensitive to this and still don't have an issue with the new interface. YMMV

 

[ke-iron]

I've had every Apple TV and I couldn't agree more with the change to the white background. It just looks much better than the plain black. The white isn't all plain white either, there are different shades of white in there.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Themes are needed as options. My eyes find it piercing.

 

[chiwaw]

In Steve's time, Apple was much more thorough.

That's mostly rose-tinted glasses, tho.

The original iPad had sub-par hardware and a painfully low resolution. The original iPhone was nearly unusable as a smartphone. The previous Apple TVs have been released under Jobs and yet they always trailed behind the competition. The original iOS dev program was a catastrophe, while trying to push a programming language (Objective-C) that is still widely despised (thankfully Apple recently replaced it with the much better Swift language).

All these products got enormously better over time, but they were all half-backed, incredibly crippled at launch.