“It seems like we’ve been waiting for years for Apple to reinvent the TV,” Walt Mossberg writes for Re/code. “We know that, in recent years, the company has pursued an effort to create its own TV service to compete with cable, one presumably to be delivered via a spiffy new device. But that effort has failed, at least for now.”
“While Apple isn’t reinventing TV or even making a whole TV, as some had speculated, it is taking a product leap in streaming set-top boxes with a new Apple TV, which will start shipping at the end of this week,” Mossberg writes. “I’ve been testing this new model, and I like it. It’s much faster and easier to navigate. But it feels very much like a first effort at a new approach.”
“Apple TV is finally a citizen in Apple’s huge app ecosystem. It now runs a version of iOS, called tvOS, and has its own app store… it’s easy to imagine Apple TV leveraging iOS to offer far more choices than the current content leader, Roku, which boasts over 2,500 channels,” Mossberg writes. “Apple TV has a great new remote that includes a slick, accurate glass touchpad, much like the one on Mac laptops, and a version of Siri that, in my tests, worked surprisingly well almost every time to find TV shows and movies. The remote now can control the volume of your TV, with no setup in most cases. And with an obscure setting on some newer TVs, it can even turn them on and off and change to the right input.”
“I don’t know when, if ever, Apple will reinvent TV. But this isn’t the moment. I can say that, if I were buying a streaming box right now, this is the one I’d buy, if only for the promise of lots of apps,” Mossberg writes. “By making the set-top box a part of its giant app and services ecosystem, the company is moving Apple TV into a future that’s much broader and bigger than Roku’s or Amazon’s. And that makes the case. In effect, while it may not have reinvented all of TV, Apple has reinvented the streaming set-top box.”
Tons more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, it’s a work in progress, but, for some time now, even with prior models, it’s been easy to recommend Apple TV. This one is a no-brainer. Go get it!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]