Technology Review | Apple TV (Fourth Generation) by Apple Inc

I learned long ago that, as peerless as their products generally are, it pays to wait before upgrading to whatever new device or operating system it is that Apple are pushing. From time to time, their updates squash one bug only to unleash several more; their newer devices, meanwhile, have a troubling predisposition towards restricting their users’ control over certain functions while enforcing library-confusing “store integration”. Whilst I’ve no objection to buying apps and media from Apple, I have no interest in most streaming services and I don’t want the total sum of the iTunes Store’s catalogue mixed in with my own painstakingly organised iTunes library. It was with some caution, then, that I finally approached the long-awaited fourth generation of Apple TV. 

 

Once nothing more than a Steve Jobs hobby horse, the third generation of Apple’s unassuming black box has served me and my family well since late 2012, all but eradicating our reliance on disc-based media. In fact, I found it hard to see how it could possibly be improved upon at all, save for perhaps loading our media library a little faster or embracing cross-media playlists. Indeed, I held out from upgrading until now as the vast majority of the box’s reviews have focused on the flashy new features that I care little about – little or nothing has been said about the fundamental features that I do. Well, that’s about to change...

Physically, the unit is about twice as thick its predecessor, presumably to accommodate the its new 32GB / 64GB disc space. As ever, Apple package it beautifully inside a luxurious obsidian box that doesn’t have to be torn open or half-destroyed to get at what’s inside, and if you buy from them directly you’ll also get a first-class service in which their couriers will text you a one-hour window that they’ll deliver within (they told me from 7:58am this morning, and the parcel arrived at 8:01. Take that, Amazon Prime). My only complaint about the ordering and delivery process was that I deliberately waited until after the 6pm despatch deadline on Tuesday to place my order, so that it’d be delivered today rather than yesterday, when I was out at work. Apple being Apple, though, they only went and pulled out all the stops to get it despatched in time for a delivery yesterday even though I’d deliberately missed their 6pm “next-day delivery” deadline. This meant that I had to contact their couriers to re-arrange delivery for today, which annoyed me. If I order after a deadline, it’s for a reason; I’m not a chimp.

Having opened the box up, I was pleased to find that I could simply unplug the power and HDMI cables from the back of my existing Apple TV and switch the units around (old Gen Three is being relegated to the master bedroom). I didn’t relish the prospect of dismounting an alcove-mounted TV and then trying to pull cables and plugs up through narrow canyons in the wall behind it without damaging them, so this was a major windfall for me. Almost as welcomely, the Apple TV was up and running in less than five minutes – it even obtained the necessary Wi-Fi password and “Home Sharing” settings directly from my iPhone via Bluetooth. Fair dues, I had to later alter the Wi-Fi network when I realised that it had connected to my slower iPhone / iPad / MacBook 2.4GHz network rather than my Apple TV-exclusive 5GHz network, but this was easily fixed.

Another relief was finding that I didn’t have to upgrade my media centre to the latest, store-integrated version of iTunes in order to connect to its iTunes library. I’d been really concerned about this beforehand, and couldn’t find any firm guidance on the point in other online reviews, so let it be known: I’m running iTunes 11.4.0.18 on my media centre and the new Apple TV connects to it quickly and without any fuss.

Once connected to Wi-Fi, the first thing to strike me about the setup was the new “Touch remote”. It’s larger, and with far more buttons than its metallic forerunner (seven, if you count the invisible touch-pad button). Having grown so used to just two buttons and a dial, I was as overwhelmed as a nonagenarian in front of a PC keyboard. Amongst the new buttons is a volume control that, without any setting up, alters my television set’s volume directly. Combined with the device’s automatic turning on and off of my telly along with itself, this neatly dispenses with the need for me to keep my TV’s comparatively colossal remote control within reach (it’s not as if we ever change the channel from Apple TV. Who watches broadcast TV these days?)

 

There’s also the much-hyped Siri button, which when held down listens to what you say and then scours online media providers (except for the enemy Amazon, obviously) to find it for you. This is an impressive weapon to deploy if you’re a frequent Netflix user, for instance, or are just after a Saturday-night movie to rent or buy from iTunes. If you say, “Show me a good film from the last year,” it really will present you with a selection of critically-acclaimed movies from the last twelve months. But what I was interested in was its ability to search and retrieve media from my own iTunes library. When I say “Breaking Bad” to Siri, for instance, I don’t want her to give me the options of either subscribing to Netflix to watch it or streaming it from my “Purchased” account within the iTunes Store online – I want it to take me to Breaking Bad in my own iTunes library on my media centre. Not only would this save me using up precious gigabytes’ download allowance and allow me to keep accurate play counts, but it’d also allow me to see the episodes as I’ve re-tagged and sorted† them, with my own custom artwork and all the spelling mistakes and typos corrected in the episode descriptions.

Incidentally, something that deterred me from taking the plunge sooner were reports that users like me, who’ve lost hours re-tagging every single item in their iTunes libraries, could no longer see their unique episode / movie descriptions on the new Apple TV. Either this issue has been fixed in an update since they flagged this up, or those users had only edited their files’ “Short Description” field within iTunes itself, as opposed to amending their “Long Description” field using third-party software (like MetaX). In line with iOS 9, the fourth generation’s tvOS actually goes further than the third did in displaying the “Long Description” for every meticulously-edited item in my library.

Furthermore, after some playing around, I’ve found that if you drill down into your own library’s menus – “Movies”, for instance – and then use Siri to say the full name of a film in there, it will start playing it; similarly, in “TV Shows”, it will take you to the most recent season of the series that you say. Now that’s useful, but with future updates I’d still like to see items retrieved from my own library when I access Siri from the main menu. Even if they were to appear as a third option behind the iTunes Store and Netflix, it’d do for me. 

Something else that I was curious about were playlists. I love ’em, but I seem to be on my own when it comes to visual media. As with the previous version of Apple TV, I had to opt-in to accessing my playlists for non-music media, and even now I still can’t play a full playlist through if it contains different types of media. This continues to infuriate me, but at least I’m no worse off than I was with the third-generation box. In fact, as one TV episode now finishes and the next begins to play automatically, as in iOS 9, I’m actually a little better off as I can do away with many of my daughter’s straightforward TV playlists, which I’d only made to avoid having to jump up every five minutes to press play.

The fourth-gen box has absolutely wowed me in some unexpected areas too. General performance is unreservedly excellent – my large library loads in seconds, and media plays almost instantaneously, as if it were stored on the device itself to begin with rather than beamed and buffered. I started to play an extended episode of Star Wars Rebels in 1080p (“The Siege of Lothal”, which sees James Earl Jones reprise his role as Darth Vader throughout the whole episode) and paused it after ten seconds to see how much of it had been buffered, and it was about three-quarters loaded. Even for my 5Ghz network, that’s fast.

There’s also a fantastic audio tweak that was absent on the previous device – you can choose to limit loud sounds, which is ideal if you’re watching a movie late at night when everyone else is in bed. There’s nothing worse than having to keep turning it up to hear dialogue and then hurriedly turning it down whenever a bomb goes off – in that situation, I always lacked the Jedi-like reflexes not to wake the family. The tvOS interface is slicker too – it’s iOS 9-white, and everything blends and slides and feels super-slick. If you’re watching something and swipe down to read its description or toggle the audio / subtitles settings, the box smoothly slides down rather than just popping up as it did with the last model.

Best of all though are the apps. Apple’s marketing of the new Apple TV has been built around apps, and I see why – these days everyone is streaming and gaming, there’s an app for everything on our phones and tablets, so why not our tellies too? The last version of Apple TV had certain apps pre-installed, while others were automatically downloaded whenever the firmware was updated, which for a curmudgeon like me meant going to great labours to hide the various NFL and BBC News apps that I was never, ever going to use. This new version, though, allows you to download what you want – and only what you want – from the App Store. The only apps that you’re stuck with are the ineradicable iTunes Store links, but even these can be moved out of sight if you hold down the play/pause button and then use the pad to rearrange them. I was therefore able to download the few apps that I’ll actually use – BBC iPlayer now amongst them! – and have these set out alphabetically along the top row, along with the orange “Computers” link to my iTunes library, which means that the shortcuts that now automatically populate the top half of the screen aren’t advertising trending movies that I have no interest in, but offering quick links to the eclectic mix of children’s and adult’s cartoons that account for almost all of our recent family viewing.

There’s no doubting that this latest incarnation of Apple TV has once again made Apple a player in the media player market, and I have little doubt that it’ll become a market leader on the strength of its distinctive features that are tailored to most of today’s consumers. Obviously, I’m not one of them – I’m a fastidious, easy-to-irritate and borderline obsessive geek who needs the box that buffers his media library to do it exactly how he wants it to, and not how someone else thinks that he’ll probably want it to. The fact that it comes so close to pleasing even me is a testament to its greatness.

Apple TV is available directly from Apple Inc from £129.00 including free delivery.


† I noticed in the iTunes Store that someone had actually given the Star Wars Digital Movie Collection a poor review on the basis that the six Star Wars movies appear in alphabetical order in his iTunes library, as opposed to chronologically or even in release order. Whilst for serious librarians I’d recommend getting hold of some decent third-party software like MetaX, which gives you complete control over your iTunes files’ metadata (DRM-protected or not, you can still amend those tags - there’s no law against it!), you can very simply alter a file’s “Sort Name” by right-clicking on it in your iTunes library, pressing “Get Info”, going to the “Sorting” tab, and then altering the “Sort Name” to, say, “Star Wars Episode 4” and so on. You can then label The Clone Wars movie as “Star Wars Episode 2.5” and, once it’s out on home video next year, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as “Star Wars Episode 3.5”. Alternatively, go for “Star Wars 1977” etc to see the films listed in release order.