People on this forum and other sites have done a great job of uncovering most of what you can do with the new ATV. Thought I would share my initial experience and a couple of things I found:
Sorry for the long post,
Peter
- If you double click the menu button it goes straight into the screen saving (and as others said they are beautiful). When one video ends it switches to another.
- If you double click the tv button it brings up the app switcher, and you can swipe up to close apps. I didn't realize this would be there.
- If you tap the siri button (don't hold it) and wait a few seconds it shows you examples of what you can do. It is a pretty good list of options.
- As others have mentioned, holding the menu button takes you to the home screen, just like pressing the home button.
- I didn't notice this at first (and it would have helped), in the on screen keyboard there is a 'recent' option for email addresses.
- I kind of like the keyboard, though I do wish they put of separate row of capital letters. With the new touch pad, having the letters on one row lets you zip back and forth pretty fast (though not as fast as a real keyboard).
- Remote is great as everyone is saying, takes very little time to adjust and you can zip around really well, though I expect to get more accurate over time. Siri so far is very accurate in transcribing what we say.
- Siri search is awesome, my family have been playing around with it and it has been surprisingly accurate. You definitely run into its limitations, but assuming Apple continue expanding it, Siri is going to be great.
- The weather and sport scores are excellent, much more useful than expected. Because the results come up so fast it is, for the first time, more convenient than taking out my phone or even looking on my apple watch.
- For weather you can ask for the forecast or the hourly forecast and get the appropriate results, there is a decent amount of info available.
- Home sharing is much faster (not surprising). Can zip through the list of movies on my computer without any lag. And the quick fast forward and rewind, as well as siri navigation within a video, all work with home sharing videos. Only thing is the thumbnails above the timeline don't keep up when scrubbing.
- Interface for home sharing hasn't changed, tv shows and everything else is organized the same as before.
- Apple Music app is nice, no siri as everyone else noted (except next point). The 'My Music' section is pretty basic though, the layout is very similar to the home sharing layout.
- Others have mentioned, in both music and home sharing, siri will search whatever is on screen. So if you ask to play a movie title, and it is currently displayed on the screen from your computer then it will play it. The moment it is scrolled off it won't work. Same goes for music. I can see the challenging in supporting so many variation, assume Apple will figure it out and that will be great.
- Photos app has potential, but as others have noted I only see shared albums. I believe I read somewhere that they are working on expanding it. When playing a video though it starts up instantly and looks great. And the scrubbing and siri navigation work too.
- For volume control, I have two tv's where I just use the tv speakers, and the siri remote automatically controlled their volume with no setup, using IR. I have one tv with a receiver and it doesn't work for that, I haven't had a chance to program it yet.
- I do have one Panasonic tv that supports HDMI-CEC, when I put the apple tv to sleep it actually shuts off the tv (great!) But when I try to wake it up the tv does not turn on. Not sure if anyone has had success with that and has any suggestions? I make post a separate thread on that one.
- One thing I think apple really missed though is the lack of a centralized queue of movies/shows. When I do a siri search I should be able to save things to a queue or list that is independent of an individual app. So in the future I can check what platform things are on (it may change over time), if there are new episodes of shows available across channels… Otherwise you turn it on and have from app to app to check your saved lists, which siri doesn’t help with. This is key for eventual cord cutting.
- And if you add something to your wishlist from a siri search it just adds it to your itunes wish list. So when you look at it in that wishlist it no longer shows you other platforms it is available on.
- Overall it is great, not a ton of great apps, but for us it is about navigating meeting and watching it, and for that the speed, ability to easily move around within a video, and siri universal search make it a clear winner. Apps like Storehouse (never used it before now) show some great potential on the app side of things.
Sorry for the long post,
Peter
