8 ms·

An Inside Look at Why Apple Hasn’t Revolutionized Television

38 points by richardboegli 10y ago

ebbv 10y ago
I have a 3rd and a 4th gen Apple TV and while I use them daily they feel like unfinished products. That is what it comes down to. For whatever reason (lack of time, budget, manpower, leadership, vision, whatever) they just are missing that final level of Apple polish that my iPhones and Macs have.
- yaur 10y ago
  IMO they nailed it with the 4th gen. Siri is really the killer feature that makes navigating through a bunch of apps and searching for content substantially better than other offerings in the space.
dexwiz 10y ago
It's still not a bad product. I don't need my TV guide to be revolutionary. Tiles of apps are widely used now. Apple the TV Provider assumed Apple would be able to make iTunes like deals to get TV and Movies like they got Music. This didn't come to fruition, so we got a pretty standard media streaming device with pretty standard prices. If you use other Apple products, AirPlay is probably the best screen sharing software out there. Try to get a Windows computer to do that with an Xbox without at least an hour of Googling and shady streaming software. In the last 2 decades Apple has made a single revolutionary product, the iPhone. The rest have been polished version of existing products. The Apple TV falls into the latter category.
- s3r3nity 10y ago
  Not sure I understand what you or the article consider "revolutionary." I would consider products like the iPod, Mac Air, iPad, hell even iTunes or the App Store concept (which wasn't released at the same time as the first iPhone, but shortly fast-followed), to be "revolutionary" If, as an example, you're going to claim that the iPod is just a polished WalkMan or Mp3 player, that's a _real_ oversimplification in a way that can be applied to the iPhone = a polished cell phone with a bigger screen (touch screen cell phones were rare, but around before the iPhone.)
  - rusk 10y ago
    I would also include the iMac, which was badly needed when it came out. A computer people actually wanted to own rather than grudgingly accept. Also the "it just works" philosophy which almost overnight raised the bar for what customers should expect in terms of UX. Also, the availability of Microsoft Office was key to early success, which other new platforms of the time (e.g. BeOS, the budding desktop Linux) just couldn't muster. Similarly the Macbook Pro for raising the bar in terms of what users could expect from the high end (aluminium body, sleek bevel, rock-solid reliability, high performance). Just to underline iTunes a little more - hand in glove with the iPod and eventually the iPhone completely turned the music industry upside down and gave it a new impetus since being destroyed by illegal downloading. App Store and iPhone revolutionised lifestyle computing (ad hoc: there's probably a better term) by getting the balance between the walled garden and innovation just right (various others had attempted this before but fell between these two stools). Also iCloud deserves a footnote for the automatic cloud backups if nothing else, which is still one of the killer features that keeps me with the platform. It's an interesting correlation that most of these innovations (perhaps all?) proceeded under Steve Jobs' watch. Interesting that not much has happened since ... the watch maybe is kind of cool but I don't think we're seeing the same kind of stellar revolutionary uptake and ROI with these other products. I wonder if he was around still would apple have made inroads into TV yet? Not much higher walled gardens than Film (Pixar), Music or Telecomms ... it would at least have been interesting to watch. Many say he wasn't the nicest guy going but for me that's beside the point. Innovator on a global scale. RIP
  - sametmax 10y ago
    The iPod was not revolutionary. Arcos did a superior product before apple. They failed to market it. The iPad and mac air are not revolutionary. They are evolutions of iphone and mac book. A good idea don't make something revolutionary. Making something bigger or thiner is not a revolution unless you talk about 2 orders magnitude. iTune and the app store concepts are not revolutionary. They are just paid version of existing concepts. Linux had official software repo for decades. We used pirated music download services online for years. Apple products are never revolutionary. This word is just, literally, the one used in all their PR and people repeat it again and again. They take good existing idea (touch screens finger control, phone PDA, mp3 players), use them, make them better, integrate them better. They build great hardware, add solid software on top of it and design friendly beautiful UI to use them. The only apple revolution is their ability to always improve the user experience. Not their products. The apple watch has a poor user experience, and hence nobody uses it. This is not to diminish apple's merit. What they do is hard. It's just not revolutionary. Inventing the paper print is. Inventing the vaccine is. Inventing Internet is. Creating a better phone you manipulate by touching the screen years after Palm existed is not revolutionary. It's innovation.
- pmalynin 10y ago
  "Try to get a Windows computer to do that with an Xbox without at least an hour of Googling and shady streaming software." My TV has Miracast, which is natively supported by my Android and Windows PCs and casting on the TV is literally a button away, but neither my iPhone nor my Mac supports ... and Miracast is a better technology.
  - rusk 10y ago
    Not quite an XBox, but my PS4 does this quite nicely out of the box with Plex. As an aside I'd also highly recommend "Sofaplay" which is by far the easiest way I've found to beam video to my Samsung Smart TV from my MBP. Literally "just works" dragging a file onto a drop-target. Does the transcoding and everything with '0' fuss.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    Xbox One has built-in Miracast support, too. There's a free Miracast app on the Xbox One to receive Miracast and stream it to your TV. (The app is called something like "Wireless Streaming", published by Microsoft themselves. I don't think they currently bundle it onto the Xbox out of the box, but they should.)
- sixothree 10y ago
  It may not be a bad product but the prices are annoyingly high compared to netflix, amazon prime, or just about any other service. And the device itself is fairly lackluster, especially compared to Amazon Fire. Apple TV is one of my more disappointing purchases.
- WayneBro 10y ago
  I use https://www.airserver.com/ https://www.airserver.com/ on my Windows computer and I can stream all of my devices to it. As a matter fact the only thing I want plugged into my TV is a Windows computer. It's the best. I get all the content that I want plus video games. I feel bad for people who are stuck with locked down walled garden devices.
- nick_ 10y ago
  AirPlay screen mirroring used to be good. They crippled the frame rate a few years ago to discourage casting pirated content from computer to Apple TV.
bbarn 10y ago
I considered an apple tv at one point. My fiancee is all in on apple otherwise, and the roku/blu ray/smart tv for various services was getting a little cluttered. Then I went to a friends house, and used his xbox one. It does everything all of these systems do, streams every major provider, and uh, it's also an xbox. Since then we've ditched every other device in the living room.
- alistairSH 10y ago
  It's also physically huge, draws more power, and costs more. And the UI is a bit "clunky" compared to tvOS. Yeah, if you play games, it makes sense. But, for straight media streaming, I'll take the Apple TV.
  - hocuspocus 10y ago
    For straight media streaming, most people will just take "nothing" though, since their TV does the job fine (and even a better job if you watch UHD content).
    - greedo 10y ago
      Until the embedded app in your smart TV is orphaned/deprecated when streaming providers change protocols etc.
      - rrdharan 10y ago
        Or you get pwned when exploits some terrible unpatched security flaw in your unupdated TV software.
      - hocuspocus 10y ago
        When that happens I'll get something cheap that supports UHD, it's really impossible to justify the price of an Apple TV when the competition does more for less.
    - alistairSH 10y ago
debt 10y ago
Snapchat is doing it. They went at it from the right angle. Limited options and curated constant with instant access(you just tap). The user isn't overwhelmed with options and the content is of a decently high standard. Apple TV is way too cumbersome for most people for a dying medium.
- pvg 10y ago
  What's the dying medium here? Pictures that move?
- valuearb 10y ago
  Snapchats UI is a puzzle wrapped in a riddle, buried in an enigma. Just a terrible UI.
valuearb 10y ago
No surprise they went to Gene Munster for a comment. Munster is the dweeb predicted Apple would make their own TV for 6 years running, and frantically pestered Apple on investor calls to make it happen. This despite the fact that the entire Television market is a tiny fraction of the PC market, let alone the smartphone/tablet markets, and it never made sense for Apple to ever make a TV set. Most analysts have no clue what it takes to run a business, they are focused on balance sheet and income statements separate from the reality that created them (which is the exact opposite of what Buffett does). The Apple Watch was about as successful as was possible (probably the best selling watch in history by revenues), and some analysts flipped out that it wasn't as big as the iPhone (even though Apple Watch outsold iPhone in their first year). The latest AppleTV is great, a substantial improvement to the previous model, and very competitive in every way other than cost (it's ease of use premiums is worthwhile though IMHO). I use Siri, play games with my kids, subscribed to HBO/Netflix, etc. The only reason sales declined over the previous model is that it's significantly more expensive. But the reality is the hardware can't ever be a big product for Apple, other than opening the door to getting a piece of subscription revenues for streaming content. The only thing left holding back AppleTV, Xbox, Roku, Fire, Google, et al, is access to live and current tv content. Apple hasn't been able to crack the code to get live TV channels yet, but neither has most anyone else. The real problem is the cable business model, and it needs to fracture a little more before it breaks entirely and all the set top boxes get access to all the content.
- analogmemory 10y ago
  Exactly, the cable industry isn't going to let go of their precious. I've had most of the tv "internet boxes" (Roku, Xbox, AppleTV, now Google via Shield) I still can't get live tv. Most of the TV apps require a cable login. The best I can get is youtube streams that is cast to the google box. But it's sub-optimal as it's prickly to find the content i want.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    >"Most of the TV apps require a cable login." This is reason I will never buy an Apple TV device again. There are regular "updates" to Apple TV. Those updates entail putting new crapware on the home screen which when you launch them want your Cable TV login. Why if I had cable TV would I use the Apple TV to access content I already have on Cable TV without the Apple TV?
jly 10y ago
I enjoy my Apple TVs and use them nearly daily (3rd and 4th gens). It's a nice product and what it does it does well. There has always been this expectation that it will one day replace my cable TV, without which keeps it limited to little more than a Roku/Fire device. I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem (Macbook Pros, iPhone, Apple TV), and now I feel locked in to the device because of my decision to buy a lot of content through the iTunes store. I now have a large library of movies and TV shows that cannot be accessed via Roku, XBox, etc. It's partly because of this that I root for Apple and their TV products to succeed.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
> The features will probably boost Apple TV sales as consumers increasingly upgrade to 4K television sets, but those enhancements alone probably aren't enough to turn the gadget into a groundbreaking, iPhone-caliber product. What a stupid thing to say. With the iPhone, one can: Pay bills Play games Text your friend in another country Call your mom Check your bank statement Deposit checks Call you dad Tweet your grandmother Watch a video Play music The list goes on, all while being completely mobile. Apple TV? Not so much. The next iPhone-caliber product will be whatever comes AFTER smartphones. And it likely will have absolutely NOTHING to do with TV.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
WhitneyLand 10y ago
tldr/+detail/trim; Apple hired Amazon's Fire TV chief to run its TV operations. He brings hardware and content experience and this may signal renewed focus on Apple TV. 5th gen ATV is currently being tested that may release as soon as this year, codename: J105. Supports 4k streaming and HDR sources say. The ATV improvements are needed to stay competitive as 4K TVs become mainstream, but these alone probably will not make it a groundbreaking, iPhone-caliber product. Apple engineers have repeatedly been forced to compromise on their vision of revolutionizing the living room sources say. Apple's difficulties in this space are a combination of difficulties negotiating iTunes style efficient/cheap deals and innovative, fast competitors
tarikjn 10y ago
IMHO the real thing that Apple has been missing is not live TV, but interactive gaming. The weak performances of Nintendo with the Wii U presented/presents a very good opportunity for Apple to create an environment, APIs, and accessories for interactive gaming, e.g. Wiimote-type accessories or actual Wiimote bluetooth pairing, multiplayer with iPhone paired to the AppleTV etc. There are some APIs and MFI specs for controllers, but it could go much further, and they need a killer-game that demonstrates the power of the ecosystem.
jccalhoun 10y ago
Unless you are buying movies and tv shows from Apple, I just don't see any appeal to the appletv. I have a firetv and I don't feel any need to even consider apple's solution
Spooky23 10y ago
It's a bizarre article. People have been nipping at Apple for this crap for ages, and they just keep printing money. They're capitalized higher than giant oil conglomerates at this point. When I see quotes like: "To a certain extent, the Apple TV is handcuffed by its parent's addiction to fat margins. Apple is constitutionally allergic to losing money on a product..." you need to eyeroll. The product is probably a moderate success, and is really a margin enhancer product.
nunez 10y ago
We've had an Apple TV for about a year, and in a post-cable world, it's a perfect device. We don't have cable. My wife is much more picky about technology than I am and also watches way more TV than I do. She loves the thing. The apps have all of the shows that she used to watch when we did, and things like Siri make it easy to pull up whatever you want without having to dig through apps to find it. The bigger issue is this: a couple can watch TV in the middle of Oregon at decent quality without having fast Internet. You need fast Internet for the Apple TV to function. Much of America doesn't have access to this.

38 points by richardboegli 10y ago

ebbv 10y ago

I have a 3rd and a 4th gen Apple TV and while I use them daily they feel like unfinished products. That is what it comes down to. For whatever reason (lack of time, budget, manpower, leadership, vision, whatever) they just are missing that final level of Apple polish that my iPhones and Macs have.

yaur 10y ago
IMO they nailed it with the 4th gen. Siri is really the killer feature that makes navigating through a bunch of apps and searching for content substantially better than other offerings in the space.

dexwiz 10y ago

It's still not a bad product. I don't need my TV guide to be revolutionary. Tiles of apps are widely used now. Apple the TV Provider assumed Apple would be able to make iTunes like deals to get TV and Movies like they got Music. This didn't come to fruition, so we got a pretty standard media streaming device with pretty standard prices. If you use other Apple products, AirPlay is probably the best screen sharing software out there. Try to get a Windows computer to do that with an Xbox without at least an hour of Googling and shady streaming software. In the last 2 decades Apple has made a single revolutionary product, the iPhone. The rest have been polished version of existing products. The Apple TV falls into the latter category.

s3r3nity 10y ago
Not sure I understand what you or the article consider "revolutionary." I would consider products like the iPod, Mac Air, iPad, hell even iTunes or the App Store concept (which wasn't released at the same time as the first iPhone, but shortly fast-followed), to be "revolutionary" If, as an example, you're going to claim that the iPod is just a polished WalkMan or Mp3 player, that's a _real_ oversimplification in a way that can be applied to the iPhone = a polished cell phone with a bigger screen (touch screen cell phones were rare, but around before the iPhone.)
- rusk 10y ago
  I would also include the iMac, which was badly needed when it came out. A computer people actually wanted to own rather than grudgingly accept. Also the "it just works" philosophy which almost overnight raised the bar for what customers should expect in terms of UX. Also, the availability of Microsoft Office was key to early success, which other new platforms of the time (e.g. BeOS, the budding desktop Linux) just couldn't muster. Similarly the Macbook Pro for raising the bar in terms of what users could expect from the high end (aluminium body, sleek bevel, rock-solid reliability, high performance). Just to underline iTunes a little more - hand in glove with the iPod and eventually the iPhone completely turned the music industry upside down and gave it a new impetus since being destroyed by illegal downloading. App Store and iPhone revolutionised lifestyle computing (ad hoc: there's probably a better term) by getting the balance between the walled garden and innovation just right (various others had attempted this before but fell between these two stools). Also iCloud deserves a footnote for the automatic cloud backups if nothing else, which is still one of the killer features that keeps me with the platform. It's an interesting correlation that most of these innovations (perhaps all?) proceeded under Steve Jobs' watch. Interesting that not much has happened since ... the watch maybe is kind of cool but I don't think we're seeing the same kind of stellar revolutionary uptake and ROI with these other products. I wonder if he was around still would apple have made inroads into TV yet? Not much higher walled gardens than Film (Pixar), Music or Telecomms ... it would at least have been interesting to watch. Many say he wasn't the nicest guy going but for me that's beside the point. Innovator on a global scale. RIP
- sametmax 10y ago
  The iPod was not revolutionary. Arcos did a superior product before apple. They failed to market it. The iPad and mac air are not revolutionary. They are evolutions of iphone and mac book. A good idea don't make something revolutionary. Making something bigger or thiner is not a revolution unless you talk about 2 orders magnitude. iTune and the app store concepts are not revolutionary. They are just paid version of existing concepts. Linux had official software repo for decades. We used pirated music download services online for years. Apple products are never revolutionary. This word is just, literally, the one used in all their PR and people repeat it again and again. They take good existing idea (touch screens finger control, phone PDA, mp3 players), use them, make them better, integrate them better. They build great hardware, add solid software on top of it and design friendly beautiful UI to use them. The only apple revolution is their ability to always improve the user experience. Not their products. The apple watch has a poor user experience, and hence nobody uses it. This is not to diminish apple's merit. What they do is hard. It's just not revolutionary. Inventing the paper print is. Inventing the vaccine is. Inventing Internet is. Creating a better phone you manipulate by touching the screen years after Palm existed is not revolutionary. It's innovation.
pmalynin 10y ago
"Try to get a Windows computer to do that with an Xbox without at least an hour of Googling and shady streaming software." My TV has Miracast, which is natively supported by my Android and Windows PCs and casting on the TV is literally a button away, but neither my iPhone nor my Mac supports ... and Miracast is a better technology.
- rusk 10y ago
  Not quite an XBox, but my PS4 does this quite nicely out of the box with Plex. As an aside I'd also highly recommend "Sofaplay" which is by far the easiest way I've found to beam video to my Samsung Smart TV from my MBP. Literally "just works" dragging a file onto a drop-target. Does the transcoding and everything with '0' fuss.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Xbox One has built-in Miracast support, too. There's a free Miracast app on the Xbox One to receive Miracast and stream it to your TV. (The app is called something like "Wireless Streaming", published by Microsoft themselves. I don't think they currently bundle it onto the Xbox out of the box, but they should.)
sixothree 10y ago
It may not be a bad product but the prices are annoyingly high compared to netflix, amazon prime, or just about any other service. And the device itself is fairly lackluster, especially compared to Amazon Fire. Apple TV is one of my more disappointing purchases.
WayneBro 10y ago
I use https://www.airserver.com/ https://www.airserver.com/ on my Windows computer and I can stream all of my devices to it. As a matter fact the only thing I want plugged into my TV is a Windows computer. It's the best. I get all the content that I want plus video games. I feel bad for people who are stuck with locked down walled garden devices.
nick_ 10y ago
AirPlay screen mirroring used to be good. They crippled the frame rate a few years ago to discourage casting pirated content from computer to Apple TV.

bbarn 10y ago

I considered an apple tv at one point. My fiancee is all in on apple otherwise, and the roku/blu ray/smart tv for various services was getting a little cluttered. Then I went to a friends house, and used his xbox one. It does everything all of these systems do, streams every major provider, and uh, it's also an xbox. Since then we've ditched every other device in the living room.

alistairSH 10y ago
It's also physically huge, draws more power, and costs more. And the UI is a bit "clunky" compared to tvOS. Yeah, if you play games, it makes sense. But, for straight media streaming, I'll take the Apple TV.
- hocuspocus 10y ago
  For straight media streaming, most people will just take "nothing" though, since their TV does the job fine (and even a better job if you watch UHD content).
  - greedo 10y ago
    Until the embedded app in your smart TV is orphaned/deprecated when streaming providers change protocols etc.
    - rrdharan 10y ago
      Or you get pwned when exploits some terrible unpatched security flaw in your unupdated TV software.
    - hocuspocus 10y ago
      When that happens I'll get something cheap that supports UHD, it's really impossible to justify the price of an Apple TV when the competition does more for less.
  - alistairSH 10y ago

debt 10y ago

Snapchat is doing it. They went at it from the right angle. Limited options and curated constant with instant access(you just tap). The user isn't overwhelmed with options and the content is of a decently high standard. Apple TV is way too cumbersome for most people for a dying medium.

pvg 10y ago
What's the dying medium here? Pictures that move?
valuearb 10y ago
Snapchats UI is a puzzle wrapped in a riddle, buried in an enigma. Just a terrible UI.

valuearb 10y ago

No surprise they went to Gene Munster for a comment. Munster is the dweeb predicted Apple would make their own TV for 6 years running, and frantically pestered Apple on investor calls to make it happen. This despite the fact that the entire Television market is a tiny fraction of the PC market, let alone the smartphone/tablet markets, and it never made sense for Apple to ever make a TV set. Most analysts have no clue what it takes to run a business, they are focused on balance sheet and income statements separate from the reality that created them (which is the exact opposite of what Buffett does). The Apple Watch was about as successful as was possible (probably the best selling watch in history by revenues), and some analysts flipped out that it wasn't as big as the iPhone (even though Apple Watch outsold iPhone in their first year). The latest AppleTV is great, a substantial improvement to the previous model, and very competitive in every way other than cost (it's ease of use premiums is worthwhile though IMHO). I use Siri, play games with my kids, subscribed to HBO/Netflix, etc. The only reason sales declined over the previous model is that it's significantly more expensive. But the reality is the hardware can't ever be a big product for Apple, other than opening the door to getting a piece of subscription revenues for streaming content. The only thing left holding back AppleTV, Xbox, Roku, Fire, Google, et al, is access to live and current tv content. Apple hasn't been able to crack the code to get live TV channels yet, but neither has most anyone else. The real problem is the cable business model, and it needs to fracture a little more before it breaks entirely and all the set top boxes get access to all the content.

analogmemory 10y ago
Exactly, the cable industry isn't going to let go of their precious. I've had most of the tv "internet boxes" (Roku, Xbox, AppleTV, now Google via Shield) I still can't get live tv. Most of the TV apps require a cable login. The best I can get is youtube streams that is cast to the google box. But it's sub-optimal as it's prickly to find the content i want.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"Most of the TV apps require a cable login." This is reason I will never buy an Apple TV device again. There are regular "updates" to Apple TV. Those updates entail putting new crapware on the home screen which when you launch them want your Cable TV login. Why if I had cable TV would I use the Apple TV to access content I already have on Cable TV without the Apple TV?

jly 10y ago

I enjoy my Apple TVs and use them nearly daily (3rd and 4th gens). It's a nice product and what it does it does well. There has always been this expectation that it will one day replace my cable TV, without which keeps it limited to little more than a Roku/Fire device. I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem (Macbook Pros, iPhone, Apple TV), and now I feel locked in to the device because of my decision to buy a lot of content through the iTunes store. I now have a large library of movies and TV shows that cannot be accessed via Roku, XBox, etc. It's partly because of this that I root for Apple and their TV products to succeed.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

> The features will probably boost Apple TV sales as consumers increasingly upgrade to 4K television sets, but those enhancements alone probably aren't enough to turn the gadget into a groundbreaking, iPhone-caliber product. What a stupid thing to say. With the iPhone, one can: Pay bills Play games Text your friend in another country Call your mom Check your bank statement Deposit checks Call you dad Tweet your grandmother Watch a video Play music The list goes on, all while being completely mobile. Apple TV? Not so much. The next iPhone-caliber product will be whatever comes AFTER smartphones. And it likely will have absolutely NOTHING to do with TV.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

WhitneyLand 10y ago

tldr/+detail/trim; Apple hired Amazon's Fire TV chief to run its TV operations. He brings hardware and content experience and this may signal renewed focus on Apple TV. 5th gen ATV is currently being tested that may release as soon as this year, codename: J105. Supports 4k streaming and HDR sources say. The ATV improvements are needed to stay competitive as 4K TVs become mainstream, but these alone probably will not make it a groundbreaking, iPhone-caliber product. Apple engineers have repeatedly been forced to compromise on their vision of revolutionizing the living room sources say. Apple's difficulties in this space are a combination of difficulties negotiating iTunes style efficient/cheap deals and innovative, fast competitors

tarikjn 10y ago

IMHO the real thing that Apple has been missing is not live TV, but interactive gaming. The weak performances of Nintendo with the Wii U presented/presents a very good opportunity for Apple to create an environment, APIs, and accessories for interactive gaming, e.g. Wiimote-type accessories or actual Wiimote bluetooth pairing, multiplayer with iPhone paired to the AppleTV etc. There are some APIs and MFI specs for controllers, but it could go much further, and they need a killer-game that demonstrates the power of the ecosystem.

jccalhoun 10y ago

Unless you are buying movies and tv shows from Apple, I just don't see any appeal to the appletv. I have a firetv and I don't feel any need to even consider apple's solution

Spooky23 10y ago

It's a bizarre article. People have been nipping at Apple for this crap for ages, and they just keep printing money. They're capitalized higher than giant oil conglomerates at this point. When I see quotes like: "To a certain extent, the Apple TV is handcuffed by its parent's addiction to fat margins. Apple is constitutionally allergic to losing money on a product..." you need to eyeroll. The product is probably a moderate success, and is really a margin enhancer product.

nunez 10y ago

We've had an Apple TV for about a year, and in a post-cable world, it's a perfect device. We don't have cable. My wife is much more picky about technology than I am and also watches way more TV than I do. She loves the thing. The apps have all of the shows that she used to watch when we did, and things like Siri make it easy to pull up whatever you want without having to dig through apps to find it. The bigger issue is this: a couple can watch TV in the middle of Oregon at decent quality without having fast Internet. You need fast Internet for the Apple TV to function. Much of America doesn't have access to this.