where is the remote
there it is one of the minor announcements at apple spring loaded
event was the update to the apple tv now that's not as exciting as what comes
with the apple tv which is a brand new updated siri remote
we don't have to use this anymore now where did i put that one
ah there it is the new siri remote does
come with all the available apple tvs like this
new 4k model and the remarkably still available hd
model but if you're already the proud owner of an
apple tv you can get the siri remote on its own for 60 that seems a little
bit steep so to find out if it's worth the money i'm going to compare it to the old one
and see just how it stacks up but to do that let's figure out what
made the old one so bad in the first place the old siri
remote was one of apple's design failures of the last decade like the butterfly keyboard
the design is a case of form compromising function
with early versions of the remote people were having troubles telling which way
was up in dark living rooms because it's black and all the buttons
look the same with nothing really to orient it they did add a white circle to the menu
button to help but that didn't solve the many other problems the touchpad is just
bad you have to move your fingers so much just to navigate around the
interface and it goes from edge to edge while
being clickable so if you do find the remote in the
couch cushions while something is playing and you don't grab it correctly you'll
pause your video and if you grab it correctly from the bottom you're
grabbing the glossy part which is so prone to smears and hand goop it never
looks good you can clean it but it's futile because
you're going to need to wear white gloves if you don't want to make it dirty again
there's other stuff too these volume buttons are convenient
but there's no mute button and i can't get it to work with that old receiver
there it charges through lightning and the horizontal keyboard on tv os
is really cumbersome
this design is much much better
firstly it's no longer black so you can see it on
a black sofa it's much thicker and has a
curved bottom so it's less likely to slip between the cushions
and feels much nicer in the hand still looks good too
i'd say these design improvements are worth about
15 next is
the d-pad this has many benefits firstly it's
no longer too easy to press the select button when grabbing the remote because
the button doesn't go the edge and is clearly defined it works like any other d-pad
but apple has also kept it touch sensitive like the old remote
you can turn that off if you want though more interestingly is a circular
jog control like you got on an old clickwheel ipod
though it's not quite obvious how that works to use it you have to
pause the video then rest your finger on the edge of the click wheel
until a little circular dial shows up on the progress bar
and then you can swirl away it's nice but i think what i want
is to be able to turn off the swiping gestures while keeping
the spinny jog dial available with regular d-pad presses but that'd be just
yet another setting too many still a little disappointing
i'd say that these improvements are worth
another 15 some
other changes of value is the addition of a mute button
which i would say is worth about four dollars there's a power button to turn
your tv on and off uh two dollars what was once mislabeled
as a menu button is now properly labeled as a back button
two dollars and the siri button has now been moved to the side
another two dollars what won't add any value is the fact that the keyboard
remains one-dimensional and lightning charging persists so
doing the calculations here
um that comes out to about
forty dollars which is twenty dollars less than the sixty dollars
that apple asks for the remote if you already got in
apple tv and are suffering with the old remote that's a lot to swallow but
i guess it's better that you can buy it as a standalone option as opposed to
having to upgrade to a completely new apple tv for
180 dollars
and as for that apple tv well the processor's been updated to the a12 chip
so that should mean it should run a little bit faster for a little bit longer
through more os updates functionality wise though all you really get is the
addition of HDR at 4k 60 frames per second
that's great if your tv supports it and the content you watch supports it
and if you're among the few who own a homepod or even two
this new box supports e-arc meaning you can send audio from your tv
through the apple tv to your homepods minis will be supported in the fall
at a hundred and eighty dollars for 32 gigabytes of storage and 199 dollars for
64 gigabytes of storage it really is quite expensive in the
world of set-top boxes in the past it was a bad option quite
simply because of that remote but now it's a little bit easier to justify
and less annoying so that means that the final design
failure that apple needs to fix is the charging of the magic mouse
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one interesting thing i discovered is i have this
original apple remote and it still
works with a current apple tv how cool
is that