The Apple TV’s touchpad sweeps and misses it as a good remote control

It’s rare to find a button that is almost universally hated, but the infamous touch panel on the Apple TV’s Siri Remote may be the exception. Even more than half a decade after its launch, it stands as one of the most disgraceful pieces of hardware.

The shortcomings of the Apple TV remote control stem not only from a bad touchpad (and don’t get me wrong: it’s bad), but from a bigger misunderstanding on Apple’s part that makes a good remote control and the fundamental purpose of the devices. .

The typical TV remote is large and ugly, but it is also very easy to find and navigate thanks to different patterns of buttons that make it clear what you are touching, even without controlling it. In general, no one has ever been too confused about how to find the giant rubber seesaw that says “VOLUME” or that does the big, often glowing red on / off button.

Apple’s remote controls have always been much simpler and smaller, but the older models still had clear buttons for key functions such as navigation and playback control. And very importantly, you can distinguish them.

But the so-called Siri Remote breaks away from the designs when it was launched in 2015 along with the fourth-generation Apple TV. The new Apple TV features the biggest boost to Apple’s set-top box ambitions to date, with the launch of its tvOS platform, an App Store, and aims to become a one-stop shop for all your TVs. needs.

The remote control is designed to complement these ambitions. Most importantly, the directional pad was removed and replaced with a no-touch pad intended to closely mimic the touch screens found on iPhones and iPads. After all, the Apple TV can now run iOS applications, and it presumably needs an iOS-style control system.

But in the pursuit of the smartphone experience, Apple has lost sight of the key elements of a good TV remote control. The rounded glass and aluminum design of the Siri Remote looked fantastic. In practice, however, the small remote control was even easier to lose than its already small predecessors, with a design that seems tailored to move between couches and under pillows.

The minimalist design stripped the remote to just a few buttons, but the virtually symmetrical layout made it almost impossible to distinguish between the buttons in the dark (for example, when watching a movie). Pick up the remote in the wrong way, and instead of pressing the play / pause button to stop your app, you can press the TV button – which sends you out of the app and takes you to Apple’s overcrowded TV -app take.

Add software updates that have changed what the buttons actually do (the TV button used to be a home button until Apple released the TV app in 2019), and this is another accusation of the remote control’s chase over function. It even seems like Apple is 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 easier to indicate which side it’s on .

And then there’s the touchpad. With only the matte texture that distinguishes it from the glossy grip of the remote, it suffers from the same orientation issues as the other buttons. If you pick up the remote in the wrong way, you will swipe on useless glass if you were planning to move around in the operating system or fly through a display if you just wanted to grab the remote.

Even if you can orient it properly, the overly sensitive and opaque nature of the touchpad makes it easy to overdo whatever you tried to do in the first place. In theory, the touchpad is a useful tool for playing games, browsing program pages, and scrolling through a Netflix program effortlessly. In practice, almost all of these tasks are terrible.

The remote control is such a problem that when Swiss TV and Internet provider Salt started offering Apple TVs as set-top boxes, it worked with Apple to make a simpler, more traditional remote control to serve customers instead. One of the biggest changes is the change from the touchpad to a regular rubber-D pad. The touchpad promises unlimited functionality, but it’s so hard to use less versatile import method is actually more useful. (The $ 20 Salt remote controls are regularly sold on eBay, nearly tripling their value for dissatisfied customers in other markets.)

But for all these problems, the failures of the Siri Remote all seem to have one common cause: the smartphone version of the traditional TV remote control. The sleek design and touchpad interface are things that helped the original iPhone to its great success. But for a TV remote control – a device that can be easily found in a sea of ​​pillows and just works without you having to tear your eyes away from the latest episode of The Mandalorian – these are exactly the wrong features.

Apple has made a remote that is an unmistakably beautiful piece of hardware. How many TV remotes outside the Siri Remote can claim that it actually looks well? But the touchpad’s minimalism and misplaced attempt to turn the entire remote into something it does not make it, like other failed Apple buttons in front of it: a stern warning of the dangers of form after function.