Apple TV’s touchpad slips and fails to be a good remote

It’s rare to find a button that’s almost universally hated, but Apple TV’s infamous Siri remote touchpad might be the exception. Even more than half a decade after its introduction, it bills itself as one of the nastiest pieces of hardware.

The failures of the Apple TV remote don’t just stem from a bad touchpad (and don’t get me wrong: it’s bad) but a broader misunderstanding on Apple’s part of what makes a good remote and the basic purpose of these devices.

The typical TV remote control is big and ugly, but it’s also extremely easy to find and navigate thanks to different button designs that clearly indicate what you’re touching, even without verification. Generally speaking, no one has ever been too confused on how to find the giant rubber rocker that says “VOLUME” or what the huge, often glowing red power button does.

Apple’s remotes have always been much simpler and smaller, but its older models still had separate buttons for key features like navigation and playback control. And most importantly, you could distinguish them.

But the so-called Siri Remote broke with those designs when it was introduced alongside the fourth-generation Apple TV in 2015. The new Apple TV featured the biggest overhaul of Apple’s set-top box ambitions to date. , by showcasing its tvOS platform, a Store app, and the goal of becoming a one-stop shop for all your TV needs.

The remote control was designed to complement these ambitions. Most notably, the directional pad has been removed and replaced with a featureless touchpad intended to more closely mimic the touchscreens of iPhones and iPads. After all, the Apple TV could now run iOS-style apps, so presumably an iOS-style control scheme was needed to match.

But in its quest to emulate the smartphone experience, Apple has lost sight of the key elements of a good TV remote. The light glass and aluminum design of the Siri Remote was fantastic. In practice, however, the tiny remote was even easier to lose than its already small predecessors, with a design that appears to be tailor-made to fit between sofa seats and under cushions.

The minimalist design reduced the remote to just a few buttons, but the nearly symmetrical layout made it almost impossible to distinguish between these buttons in the dark (for example, when watching a movie). Pick up the remote the wrong way around and instead of pressing the play / pause button to stop your show, you can press the TV button – which lets you exit the show and takes you to the overloaded TV app from Apple.

Add in software updates that changed what those buttons actually do (the TV button worked as a home button until Apple released the TV app in 2019), and that’s another act of charge of the pursuit of the form by the remote control. Even Apple seems to be aware of this: when it refreshed the Siri Remote for the fifth-generation Apple TV 4K, it added a white ring to the menu button to make it a little easier to tell which side is on. high.

And then there’s the touchpad. With only its matte texture serving to distinguish it from the shiny grip on the remote, it suffers from the same orientation issues as other buttons. Pick up the remote the wrong way, and you’ll end up slipping on unnecessary glass when you wanted to move around the operating system or wade your way through a show when you just wanted to grab the remote.

While you can orient it the right way, the overly sensitive and opaque nature of the touchpad makes it easy to get past anything you were trying to do in the first place. In theory, the touchpad is a useful tool for playing games, browsing app pages, and effortlessly browsing a Netflix show. In practice, it is terrible in almost all of these tasks.

The remote is so problematic that when Swiss TV and Internet provider Salt started offering Apple TVs as set-top boxes, they worked with Apple to create a simpler, more traditional remote control to offer to customers. One of the biggest changes is the move from the touchpad to a regular rubber D-pad. The touchpad promises unlimited functionality, but it’s so difficult to use that a less The versatile input method is actually more useful. (Salt $ 20 remotes regularly sell on eBay for nearly triple their value to disgruntled customers in other markets.)

But for all these problems, the failures of the Siri Remote all stem from one common cause: the smartphone-ification of the traditional TV remote. The svelte design and touchpad interface are elements that helped rocket the original iPhone to its huge success. But for a TV remote control – a device that should be easily found in a sea of ​​cushions and simply operate without you having to look away from the last episode of The Mandalorian – these are precisely the bad traits.

Apple made a remote control that is undeniably a beautiful piece of equipment. Aside from the Siri remote, how many TV remotes can claim to actually look like Well? But the touchpad minimalism and the misplaced attempt to try and turn the entire remote into something that doesn’t make it like other Apple buttons that have failed before it: a stark warning of the dangers of pursuit of form on function.