The Apple TV touchpad slides and fails to be a good remote control

It is rare to find a button that is almost universally hated, but the infamous Apple TV Siri Remote touchpad may be the exception. Even after half a decade after its launch, it remains one of the most vilified pieces of hardware.

The flaws in the Apple TV remote control stem not only from a bad touchpad (and don’t get me wrong: it is bad), but from a big misunderstanding on the part of Apple about what makes a good remote and the purpose of these devices.

The typical TV remote control is big and ugly, but it’s also extremely easy to find and navigate, thanks to the different button patterns that make it clear what you’re playing, even without checking. Generally speaking, no one has ever been too confused about how to find the giant rubber rocker that says “VOLUME” or what the huge, often bright, red power button does.

Apple’s remote controls have always been much simpler and smaller, but its older models still had separate buttons for important features like navigation and playback control. And, crucially, you could differentiate them.

But the so-called Siri Remote broke with these designs when it was launched alongside the fourth generation Apple TV in 2015. The new Apple TV has presented the biggest overhaul of Apple’s set-top box ambitions to date, featuring its tvOS platform, a Store app and the goal of becoming a one stop shop for all your TV needs.

The remote control was designed to complement these ambitions. Most notably, the directional pad has been removed and replaced with a touchpad with no features designed to more closely emulate the touch screens found on iPhones and iPads. After all, Apple TV could run iOS-style apps now, so presumably it needed an iOS-style control scheme to match.

But in its quest to emulate the smartphone experience, Apple has lost sight of the key elements of a good TV remote. The Siri Remote’s narrow glass and aluminum design looked fantastic. In practice, however, the tiny remote control was even easier to lose than its already small predecessors, with a design that seems to be tailor-made to slip between the sofa seats and under the cushions.

The minimalist design reduced the remote to just a few buttons, but the virtually symmetrical layout made it almost impossible to distinguish between buttons in the dark (say, when watching a movie). Take the remote control the wrong way, and instead of pressing the play / pause button to stop the program, you can press the TV button – which takes you out of the program and takes you to the overcrowded Apple TV app.

Add software updates that have changed what these buttons actually do (the TV button used to function as a home button until Apple launched the TV app in 2019), and it’s another accusation of the remote control’s pursuit of the form function. Even Apple seems to be aware of this: when it upgraded the Siri remote to the fifth generation Apple TV 4K, it added a white ring to the menu button to make it a little easier to know which side is up.

And then there’s the touchpad. With only its matte texture to distinguish it from the shiny handle on the remote, it suffers from the same orientation problems as the other buttons. Take the remote control the wrong way and you will end up hitting a useless glass when you want to move the operating system or making way for a show when you just want to take the remote.

Even if you can guide it in the right way, the touchpad’s overly sensitive and opaque nature makes it easy to get past whatever you’re trying to do in the first place. In theory, the touchpad is a useful tool for playing games, scrolling through application pages and effortlessly scrolling through a Netflix program. In practice, it is terrible at almost all of these tasks.

The remote control is such a problem that when the Swiss TV and Internet service provider Salt started offering Apple TVs as set-top boxes, it worked with Apple to make a more simple and traditional remote control to offer to customers. One of the biggest changes is replacing the touchpad with a normal rubber D-pad. The touchpad promises unlimited functionality, but it is so difficult to use that a any less versatile input method is actually more useful. (The $ 20 Salt remotes are routinely sold on eBay for almost three times their value to dissatisfied customers in other markets.)

But in spite of all these problems, Siri Remote’s flaws originate from a common cause: the smartphone-ification of the traditional TV remote control. The slender design and touchpad interface are things that helped propel the original iPhone to its enormous success. But for a TV remote control – a device that needs to be easily found in a sea of ​​pillows and works simply without requiring you to look away from the last episode of The Mandalorian – they are precisely the wrong traits.

Apple made a remote control that is an undeniably beautiful piece of hardware. Outside of Siri remote control, how many TV remote controls can say they really look Good? But the minimalism of the touchpad and the mistaken attempt to try to turn the entire remote into something that is not makes it like the other Apple buttons that failed before it: a severe warning of the dangers of chasing form instead of function.