My Apple TV Wishlist

I recently upgraded my 3rd generation Apple TV for a shiny new 64 GB 4th generation model. Being the gadget geek that I am, I have pretty much every major streaming device on the market, including Roku Stick (which replaced an old Roku Box), Fire TV Stick, Chromecast and Apple TV. I also have an Xbox One which can support most the the apps out there as well, but in the end, the Apple TV wins out as my favorite (and most used) because of the money I’ve invested in the iTunes store over the years.

The new Apple TV is a huge upgrade over the previous models, mainly becuase it now features an app store. While an app store is nothing new for these types of devices, Apple’s is already much better than everyone else on the market because of the ecosystem. Games that I have already purchased on my iPhone/iPad that have been updated support Apple TV now play on my glorious big screen TV. The UI of tvOS, the new Apple TV operating system is gorgeous and the Siri integration makes it a joy to do some normally tedious tasks.

All that being said, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Below I’ve outlined my wishlist for some things that I’d love to see Apple fix or add to Apple TV sooner rather than later.

  1. Make universal search more powerful — Universal search is a great addition to Apple TV, but is still lacking some no-brainer features. The search function that was showed off heavily during the keynote is limited to only a few apps (Netflix, Hulu and iTunes Store). I’m hoping this is something that can be easily integrated by developers with an API.
  2. Siri needs more functionality — Apple has already said that Siri control of Apple Music is coming, but this should’ve been available at launch. More often than not, any content-related tasks I want Siri to perform are not supported. More importantly, text-to-speech from the Siri remote would be hugely helpful since selecting text with the remote to search is a painful experience.
  3. Missing some huge 3rd party apps — While this isn’t one that Apple can likely fix on their own, there are still a lot of 3rd party apps that are glaringly absent on Apple TV still such as as Spotify and Amazon Video. While Amazon has a vested interested in selling Fire TVs, ignoring Apple TV is a stupid move that hopefully they’ll reverse course on.
  4. Fix the bugs — Apple TV is still buggy as hell. Perusing the Apple support communities will display a slew of comments on random reboots, crashes, missing audio and other annoyances that come with a new hardware release. Thankfully Apple has been amazingly responsive in adding in the missing features of the App Store after developers complained that discovery was lacking — I’m hoping that same swift attention will be paid to the glitches that are affecting many users.
  5. Update the iOS Remote app to support new Apple TV — I don’t know why this hasn’t happened yet, and there are rumors that it might not ever happen. It boggles my mind why Apple wouldn’t update the iOS remote app to allow users to control the Apple TV from their iPhone or iPad, especially given that adding any sort of text with the Siri remote is an awful experience.
  6. HDMI Pass Through — The biggest disappointment for me when the new Apple TV was announced was that it was missing HDMI Pass Through. I would love for Apple to try and do right what Xbox One does so wrong with this functionality and offer a truly interactive layer on top of my FiOS TV experience. There are amazing features built in the new Apple TV, such as the ability to ask “who’s in this show” to see a list of the actors that I’d love to see on live TV, but without this hardware feature built into the boxes, the only way they can do it is if the cable companies have their own apps that mimic the set-top box experience. FiOS has an app like that on Xbox, but I believe it’s fallen by the wayside. It’s a shame becuase I dream of a world where the Apple TV box is all I need for all forms of my viewing entertainment.

Do you have a new Apple TV and anything to add to this list? If so, let me know what you’d like to see added that I may have missed.