First Look at the New Apple TV, a worthy upgrade

The New Apple TV arrived at my door on Tuesday. I had been waiting a long time for an upgrade to the original Apple TV, though this new one is technically Gen4. Like all Apple products, opening the package is a wonderful experience in itself, beautiful, simple, high quality.

The first thing you notice is that the new Apple TV is bigger, same footprint, but a ½” taller and 5.4 oz heavier, you feel that there is more goodness inside. Connections are easy: power, HDMI and Ethernet or wireless, an easy swap out of my existing Apple TV. Installation was very smooth. A pleasant surprise was being asked to place my iPhone near the Apple TV so it would mirror the network settings, speeding up and simplifying installation, very cool. In fact, all my HDMI connections (CATV, BluRay, Apple TV) go through my AV receiver; just touching the Apple TV remote causes everything to switch to Apple TV in my system, easy, but sometimes inadvertant.

The UI is clean and beautiful with a significant focus on apps. The old Apple TV simply loaded content “channels” and you had to go into Settings to Hide the ones you didn’t use or want. Now to start there are only the Apple apps (Movies, TV Shows, Music, Computer, Apps Store and Settings). You must select the content apps you want (HBOgo, Netflix, Hulu, ESPN, etc) and enter your credentials from your direct account or your cable carrier which gives you access on your Apple TV.  Other apps are available for free and for fee, and I expect the list to be gargantuan like the iOS App Store.

But let’s talk about what is really exciting, the new remote! The remote has a mini-clickable track pad to easily navigate the screen. Siri has arrived and is exceptionally useful here. “Find movies with Bradley Cooper”, a list appears, “just the comedies”, the list shortens. If you ask Siri to “Find The 100”, it return with viewing options that it is available on iTunes and Netflix, so you can select your preferred or already paid for service. Siri unfortunately doesn’t work with Music, you can’t say “play smooth jazz”.

Many other voice commands make finding and watching content far easier. Ask Siri what the temperature is outside, fast forward 2 minutes, play from the beginning, what did he say (if you missed some dialog), reduce loud sounds (if you’re trying to be quiet). The remote has great other features such as triple clicking the Home button to toggle closed captions or other functions. The remote has an accelerometer that makes game playing more engaging whether you're playing tennis or flying paper airplanes or battling zombies.

Even the screensaver is a cinematic experience. They are visually exciting to simply watch. The default is the SF Bay Bridge at night, very realistic. Others are 600 MB so they might eat up more memory than you’d like.

Overall the new Apple TV is a great device, and a special early Christmas present. My wife says technology doesn’t age well, so she offered to not wrap it up for the next 6 weeks and let me have fun with it now. To read more about what Apple says about the Apple TV experience, go to http://www.apple.com/tv/experience/