Review: Apple TV

There are two ways to talk about the Apple TV. One is in Apple's language of grand statements like "all the entertainment your TV can handle." You could discuss what "the future of television" looks like, what role Siri plays in it, and how it all shakes out with Apple TV and Android TV and Fire TV. This is the What Does It All Mean bit. Or, you could compare the Apple TV to the Roku 4, Chromecast, and Fire TV alongside it on the shelf beneath the 42-inch, 720p television I bought six years ago. This is the Should You Buy It Now discussion.

Let's have the second discussion first. The latest Apple TV is available now for $149, which makes it one of the most expensive ways to watch Netflix. Is it worth it? Right now, not really.

That's not to say the Apple TV isn't a great way to watch Netflix, and everything else. It is. The squat square box is all but invisible. Plug it into the wall and your TV, pick up the remote, and you're ready. You still have to log in, a process that is its own special kind of hell that we'll get to in a moment, but once you've done that, this thing is remarkable. Video loads faster than any box I've ever used, in a way that feels magical. Click "play" in any app and poof—there it is, without buffering or lag. Scrolling backwards and forwards on the tiny remote's tiny trackpad is faster and more granular than the buttons on the remotes for those other boxes. The remote even controls the volume on your TV and will turn it on and off if you have a newer set. It's wonderful.

Siri is always there to help, too, with commands like, "Skip forward an hour" or "Go back to the beginning." My favorite is "Who's in this movie?" I rarely use the feature where you ask, "What did he say?" and it skips back 15 seconds, but I love knowing it's there. Every time you hit the mic button, Siri pops up—it's nice.

You can opt for 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage (the bigger drive costs $50 more) for downloading movies and games. If you want to watch movies in a hotel room or if you play a lot of games, you'll want the bigger storage option; if it's just chilling in your living room with the Netflix app installed, you won't even need all of the storage on the 32-gig base model. iTunes is mostly a streaming service at this point, too. Either way you get an A8 processor, which is at least fast enough for the most intense games yet on the App Store, along with all the modern Wi-Fi and Bluetooth specs you'd want.

All in all, I really like watching stuff on the new Apple TV. The trouble is getting there.

The most frustrating part of the Apple TV experience is setting it up. You can use your phone to connect your Apple TV to Wi-Fi and your iCloud account for syncing photos and iTunes purchases—I never got this to work, but that's a long story and my own fault, and I'm confident that most people will have no trouble. Sadly, this is the only smart step in a surprisingly stupid process.

When you download an app, more often than not you'll have to enter your password. This is after you enter your iTunes password, which you already did when you set the damn thing up but must do again to keep some moron from spending all your money on Sons of Anarchy. It's also after you typed in the name of the app, because Siri can't search the App Store and there are no useful discovery or browsing tools to speak of. These are easy things to fix, so why hasn't Apple fixed them? Better yet, why not just grab all this information from my iPhone? Great question. It took four hours of typing and swiping to get the Apple TV up and running with all my stuff.

When I started using the Apple TV, I hated the trackpad. Now I'm used to it, more or less, but I still accidentally brush it when I picked up the remote, racing me forward in a show. Or it'll fall between couch cushions and click in random ways, at which point all bets are off. Since it's super-sensitive—designed for flying through long side-scrolling Netflix lists—that fine frame-by-frame movement is really hard to pull off. I could rant endlessly about how sadistically awful the on-screen typing experience is, but I won't.

OK, maybe I will just a little. The on-screen keyboard is a single row of 26 letters, which is quite possibly the worst possible layout for an on-screen keyboard. Typing takes forever, especially when you mis-type everything because the trackpad is so sensitive. It wouldn't be a problem if you could use the companion Remote app to type, but you can't. You can't use Siri, either. So you're stuck typing in your password, over and over, scrolling left to right ever so carefully like you're entering nuclear codes. I may just make all of my passwords "Aaaaaaaaaaa" and blame Apple when I get hacked.

Here are two trackpad tips. First, go to settings and ratchet down the sensitivity of the pad. Two, click at the very edge of the pad to advance one item left, right, up, or down. It's awkward, but it works. Once you get it dialed in and working, it's fine, but I miss having clickable directional buttons more than I thought it was possible to miss buttons.

Another gripe is the Apple TV isn't designed for casual browsing. You're not supposed to flip through the lovely interface of layered icons with drop shadows on gray backgrounds. The interface is clean and attractive, but good luck finding anything as soon as you have more than about four rows of apps. The Apple TV is made for hunting. You have someplace you want to go; its job is to get you there as quickly as possible. Usually, the fastest way is Siri. You press (and hold!) the microphone button and say, "Movies with Jude Law," or "Action movies from the 90s," or "Funny TV shows." It'll search a handful of apps (hopefully many more soon) and show you where you can watch—with the free options first. Or just say, "open Hulu." You can also check sports scores and the weather, or even get stock information on your TV if you're that guy.

Siri is mostly great, even though it can't search through the App Store, or Apple Music, or most of your third-party apps unless they join the universal search party. It gets tripped up by shows and movies that sound more like statements than titles, though. Ask for Friends, and Siri says "Sorry, I can't help you with that." Search for You're The Worst, and Siri takes it personally. Most of the time, though, Siri works great as long as it can index the app. But don't assume all your favorite apps will just jump on board.

Which brings us to What It All Means.

The long-term play for the Apple TV has everything to do with the combination of App Store and Siri. Apps are channels, where the content goes. Siri is TV Guide, helping you figure out what to watch and how to find it. Long term that's a great idea. Short-term, Siri's not good enough, the App Store's not complete enough, and there's no good way to find things unless every cable network and developer decides to abandon their apps and branding and everything else and throw all their most valuable assets into a big pool of #content. That's never going to happen—it's very important to ABC and FOX, Netflix and Amazon, and even YouTube and Vimeo, that you know when you're watching their stuff.

It's fairly clear that Apple's vision for the future looks like Apple Music: a single service with everything you want to watch, designed in California. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't have that service. It may not have it soon, or ever. So you're left with a viewing experience all but identical to the Fire TV and Roku: voice search, a half-dozen apps you spend all your time in (though the Apple TV is missing Amazon, which hurts), and at least most of the shows and movies you want to watch.

At the moment, this box has exactly one clear-cut advantage: The Apple TV is the best TV gaming experience $150 will buy. I've been playing Beat Sports, the Wii Sports meets Guitar Hero craziness I can't quite explain or pull myself away from. The touchpad even acts like a Wii controller, but it's smaller. There are a lot of fun games now, and enough big-name games coming (Skylanders, Guitar Hero) that I can confidently say this will be a fantastic gaming machine.

All the pieces are here for it to be something bigger, too. Let's assume, five years from now, that Siri is perfect. That Apple gets 100,000 apps in the TV App Store, solves the discovery problem, kills that god-awful on-screen keyboard, updates the Remote app, and makes universal search truly universal. And let's assume networks and developers see the potential of Internet-based TV and start letting us interact with people and shows in powerful ways. You already can buy things you see on QVC just by clicking the remote, and there are some neat remote interactions with the new Care Bears "appisode," but who knows where it all goes or what it all becomes. The Apple TV has the highest ceiling of any set-top box ever made.

That is not this, though. This Apple TV is a PowerPoint presentation, not a finished execution. You can buy it now, but know that you're doing so in the hope that the App Store quickly gets bigger and better. (And in fairness, Apple's track record says this probably will happen.) If you have $149 to spare and a season of Bojack Horseman to binge, go for it. The Apple TV is a really good set-top box. But it's nothing more than that yet.