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Dave Kernen

Apple’s newest TV is worse than the previous one.

TV

I honestly wonder if anyone involved in creating the new TV actually used it for long, or at all, before releasing it.

Here are some of my primary complaints — in no particular order.

  • The new remote is far less precise than the old remote. It’s too easy to overshoot what you are scrolling to. With the old remote (without even thinking about it — in other words intuitively) you knew what to do, i.e. go up two and to the right four. With the new touchpad if you swipe too slow it does nothing, and if you swipe too fast it scrolls further than intended. You do get used to it, a little, but it’s nearly impossible to master the thumb swipe speed and distance.
  • Scrolling is no longer intuitive. And it isn’t consistent among screens. On most screens it is the opposite of “natural scrolling” (introduced in OS X Lion) but on some screens it uses natural scrolling. I know that there are users that hate natural scrolling on OS X, so they turn it off and revert to the Windows/Old method. I believe natural scrolling makes perfect sense — whether I’m on my iPhone, iPad, MBA, or using Magic Touchpad or Magic Mouse, I use the same finger movement to scroll the same direction. It’s brilliant. I even edited the registry on the Windows machines I use to behave the same way. So Apple, are you sort of kinda giving up on natural scrolling, or did that not even occur to those involved in developing the new TV? At a minimum at least give users the option of choosing natural scrolling, or the primitive method of scrolling, so at least those of us that have evolved (during the 5 minutes it took to get used to it) and embraced natural scrolling have a consistent scrolling direction on all screens of the new TV as well as all our other Apple devices.
  • Often performs unintended actions if not careful when handling the remote. And forget about wiping oily-potato-chip-fingerprints off it unless you turn the TV completely off since it works over WiFi, so blocking the IR doesn’t help like it did with the old remote.
  • The purchased TV Shows and the Purchased Movies screens are not the same. The Purchased Movies at least has a “Recent” section. The Purchased TV Shows just shows them all, and they are sorted alphabetically rather than with the most recent show at the top like the older TV, so you have to scroll way down past old shows that are long over with to reach the new Walking Dead.
  • Once you choose a purchased TV show, Walking Dead for example, there is no way to quickly choose a season — you must scroll horizontally through all seasons. This is a big issue for me since every time, it takes me to episode 2 of season 3 (an unwatched Inside the Walking Dead clip). I never watch the Inside the Walking Dead clips, so I have to scroll horizontally through season 3, season 4, and season 5, before even reaching season 6. That’s 108 episodes of scrolling before reaching the beginning of season 6, and then have to scroll more to reach the latest episode. It would be even more scrolling if I had purchased seasons 1 and 2. If Apple insists on having one horizontal row containing all episodes of all seasons, they could at least sort them in reverse chronological order — you know, with the ones you are most likely to watch at the beginning. But then since they want to take you to the first unwatched clip, I’d probably just have to scroll through everything in the reverse order to reach the latest episode that I actually want to watch. Apple could learn a lot from the way the Hulu app displays the seasons of TV shows.
  • After renting or purchasing a movie that is in your Wish List, it still remains in your Wish List. On older TV’s it would automatically be removed from your Wish List — you know, because why remain on the list?
  • After renting and watching a movie, and exiting to the movie info screen, it still shows how many days you have to begin watching (29) even though at this point it should be showing how many hours left to watch it (because you already started it). If you exit that screen then return to it, it shows correctly how many hours left. This is the same type of “no longer real time” updating of info that can be seen in Finder windows and the App Store updates screen on OS X El Capitan (more about this below).
  • No optical audio. I guess like with the new Macbook one more port would have completely ruined the industrial design or would have required it to be thicker or something. Oh wait, it’s thicker anyway.

El Capitan

As mentioned above, Apple seems to have more “no longer real time” updating of info — for lack of a better way to say it. I could be wrong but I believe it is due to the obsession with smaller batteries, which requires less processor usage to keep battery life at reasonable levels. Sure energy savings are great, but not at the expense of real time actions on the screen. Apple is optimizing processor usage, but have gone a bit too far in some cases.

I almost always have a Finder window open, and often after downloading a file the progress bar next to the downloading file stays on the screen long after it reaches 100% and is now actually done downloading. When I say long after, I’m talking hours or days. It only goes away if I perform another action it that Finder windows that causes the Finder window to update. I often have the same thing with the modified date — it will still show “Today” when in fact it should now be showing “Yesterday.” Again, performing an action that causes Finder to update the information showing corrects it, but it is an annoying “no longer real time” updating of info.

Preview has the same type of issue when inserting pages into a PDF. When inserting a page, it puts it as page 2. Then when you drag it to page 1 position, it shows two page 2’s. It doesn’t change to page 1 and page 2 until selecting another window. Again, “no longer real time” updating of info.

The App Store is another app that doesn’t always show real time changes. On the update screen, after clicking the update button, it often doesn’t show the downloading/installing status bar even though the Launch Pad icon is showing the progress bar. The App Store sits there looking as if it isn’t doing anything until the app being updated moves down to the “updated apps” section.

iCloud Drive

Sometimes iCloud Drive doesn’t sync on other devices as quickly as it should. Dropbox, SugarSync, and others begin syncing within seconds of new files being added. But iCloud Drive takes it’s sweet time far too often. If I add a file to iCloud Drive on my Mac, it sometimes takes awhile to show up in iCloud Drive on my MBA. I don’t know how long it takes because it is either relatively quick or I give up waiting and move on to other things.

Well, that’s it. I don’t expect my posting this will have any effect on any of my complaints (I have submitted a few to Apple’s feedback site) but it feels good to get this off my chest and out of my head. Thanks for reading.

Extra reading.

I’m not the only one that loves Apple and yet feels they have been making mistakes, or bad compromises lately. The two links below cover a number of other issues that I haven’t touched on.

Everything Apple Introduced This Year Kinda Sucked

“Flat Design”? Destroying Apple’s Legacy… or Saving It

Cheers, Dave