I've been using the new Apple TV to do some testing this week. My post history on the new Apple TV has been pretty bullish on the changes that I expected to see, but based on my experience so far, I'm not quite as excited as I once was.
Granted, this could change based on software updates and the release of Apple's forthcoming TV subscription service and how new 3rd party apps leverage the platform, but this definitely doesn't feel like the leapfrog device I'd hoped for. For one, I was hoping that there would be a single, elegant content library on the home screen where you could browse through every show on every service. The reality is that only when you select a specific app that you place on your "home row" (5 available spots) will the highlighted content from that app be displayed above (independently of the other services). Universal search is nice, but not quite as frictionless of an experience as I'd hoped. If you search for a title, you can see the various services it's available on, but you still have to select each service's "tab" to see which seasons or episodes are available, rather than being indexed in one single listing. It also doesn't look like you can do any in-app queue management from tvOS, favoring Apple's "wish list" instead.
Voice search is especially appreciated because typing is still a huge pain. The touchpad is a little nicer than the old remote in some ways, but now you have to pick your thumb up multiple times and make multiple swipes to get all the way from left to right, rather than being able to hold for one continuous scroll. And because there is no cursor (just the 3D effect), you don't even know sometimes what is currently selected. And aside from searching, voice controls appear fairly limited. You can pull up stocks and weather, but not much else. Typing fields that I ran into couldn't be completed using voice.
Overall, it feels pretty much like the same old Apple TV with modest UI improvements on the scale that we all probably expected to have come to the device years ago. Though I still have hopes that the experience improves over time.
Granted, this could change based on software updates and the release of Apple's forthcoming TV subscription service and how new 3rd party apps leverage the platform, but this definitely doesn't feel like the leapfrog device I'd hoped for. For one, I was hoping that there would be a single, elegant content library on the home screen where you could browse through every show on every service. The reality is that only when you select a specific app that you place on your "home row" (5 available spots) will the highlighted content from that app be displayed above (independently of the other services). Universal search is nice, but not quite as frictionless of an experience as I'd hoped. If you search for a title, you can see the various services it's available on, but you still have to select each service's "tab" to see which seasons or episodes are available, rather than being indexed in one single listing. It also doesn't look like you can do any in-app queue management from tvOS, favoring Apple's "wish list" instead.
Voice search is especially appreciated because typing is still a huge pain. The touchpad is a little nicer than the old remote in some ways, but now you have to pick your thumb up multiple times and make multiple swipes to get all the way from left to right, rather than being able to hold for one continuous scroll. And because there is no cursor (just the 3D effect), you don't even know sometimes what is currently selected. And aside from searching, voice controls appear fairly limited. You can pull up stocks and weather, but not much else. Typing fields that I ran into couldn't be completed using voice.
Overall, it feels pretty much like the same old Apple TV with modest UI improvements on the scale that we all probably expected to have come to the device years ago. Though I still have hopes that the experience improves over time.
