“Perhaps the most surprising thing about Apple’s announcement of its assault on your living room was the matter-of-fact way it revealed it. Apple didn’t need to build a TV after all,” Hilton Tarrant writes for Moneyweb. “Rather, Apple announced a fundamental overhaul of the TV puck (set-top box) that many of us have in our homes. From the outside, it looks slightly taller. But the magic is (as is always the case with Apple) in the hardware and software (and how they work together).”
“We know the current TV paradigm is broken. Channels and lists and lists and search, which hardly works. Too much content to know about. Too much content that’s hard to find or discover. Content in silos,” Tarrant writes. “It’s newly-announced tvOS (which slots in neatly alongside iOS and watchOS, and dare I suggest it, macOS) enables developers to target Apple TV for the first time. Apps are bundled so if you buy an app on iOS and there’s a TV app available, you have that too.”
“It’s the addition of Siri on the remote that holds the most promise. Apple’s natural language search has come a long way,” Tarrant writes. “Apple’s been making steady progress. It was only after the launch of Apple Watch (in tier one markets) in late April that people started taking notice. And using Siri. On the Watch, Siri is really good. Almost to the point of being surreal. And the improvements available on iOS 9 in a week’s time suggest that Apple’s confident that it’s solved this problem. When Steve Jobs, according to the Walter Isaacson biography, said ‘I finally cracked it’ in reference to the TV interface… did he mean Siri?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: When the new Apple TV launches at “the end of October,” we will be replacing several older Apple TV units with the new 64GB Apple TV models (US$199). We think doubling internal storage from the entry-level model’s 32GB ($149) to 64GB is well worth the $50 premium, don’t you? We plan on loading up on apps, so the more storage, the better!
SEE ALSO:
Analyst: Apple TV streaming service on the way, could cost at least $40 a month – September 14, 2015
Local media streaming app Plex coming to Apple TV – September 14, 2015
What Apple got right in Apple TV’s user interface – and what needs work – September 11, 2015
New Apple TV has the potential to do for television what iPhone did for mobile phones – September 11, 2015
Apple preps to conquer living room with all-new Apple TV – September 11, 2015
Hands-on with the all-new Apple TV – September 10, 2015
Gruber: Apple TV will define how all TVs will work in a few years – September 10, 2015
Here’s how much RAM is inside Apple’s iPhone 6s/Plus, iPad Pro and new Apple TV – September 10, 2015
New Apple TV sounds great, but where’s the 4K? – September 10, 2015