I’ve been using Apple stuff since my dad brought home the original Mac back in the mid 1980s. Under Steve Jobs, and to an extent since he passed, their product design has generally been exceptional. With two glaring exceptions:
Apple mice.
And AppleTV remote controls.
Their mice have been discussed and debated and generally scorned by plenty of people – especially the utter abomination that is the laughably badly named ‘Magic Mouse’ which LITERALLY CANNOT BE USED WHILE IT IS CHARGING, oh my FUCKING god what the FUCK are they doing STILL selling that absolute piece of shit?
But for now my rage is directed purely at their utterly fucking terrible remote controls for their otherwise excellent AppleTV.
It’s FAR too small. It’s FAR too flat. The several generations that added a touch sensitive surface at the top was one of the worst designs for a remote control I’ve ever seen, almost imossible to tell up from down when you pick it up, with horribly sensitive touch controls and buttons that do not help you know what they are without peering at them.
The second version tried to fix that issue by making one of the buttons more obviously raised to the touch but is still far too easily lost down the side of the sofa and far too sensitive and too difficult to easily and accurately navigate with the touch surface.
The latest version seemed to be the one to solve almost all the complaints but in so many ways it is exactly as shit to use as every other remote control they’ve ever made.
First, they seemed to be on the right track by ditching the ‘wafer-thin slab of almost featureless black’ design and drawing inspiration from the first silver non-touch sensitive remote. It’s thicker, it’s a bit heavier, it’s slightly convex on both sides, and it appears to have lost the flat smooth square of overly touch sensitivity glass at the top that was the cause of many a hurled remote.
In practice this thing is a fucking horror to use.
The top half is now dominated by a nice big round concave black button surrounded by a separate also-clickable convex black ring with four directional arrows in white – up, down, left, right.
Then beneath it are basically the same five buttons as the previous generation:
- a back button
- a home button
- a play/pause button
- a mute button
- and one longer vertical button that’s really two buttons – volume up at the top, volume down at the bottom
What’s wrong with all this? Well, working from top to bottom…
The concave round button and convex ring button(s) surrounding it are all touch sensitive and this is a fucking nightmare.
Take the most basic function of the round concave button: to select whatever item you’ve chosen on the display, such as a TV show on Netflix or Plex.
Stabbing at that button is easy enough. The problem is you have to be very careful to exactly press down and not slide your finger over the surface in ANY way while you’re doing it. Why not? Because the fucking thing is touch sensitive and if your thumb lands off-centre and slides back into the centre as you press, you’ll actually move the ‘cursor’ to a different item and select THAT instead.
But also, if you did land off-centre and didn’t slide your thumb into the centre as you clicked then you’ll probably have caught the edge of the ring button that surrounds the centre button, which ALSO moves the cursor.
So it is effectively much easier and more likely to totally bodge the simple act of using this button to select the item you’ve highlighted, than not to do that.
At the same time, the force required to press the button is quite light and so if you choose to use the centre touch-sensitive concave button to scroll around your interface, it’s all too easy to accidentally press the button in the process, again selecting something you don’t want.
Plus, that touch sensitivity is a pain in the arse generally when you’re trying to select. It’s just too easy to slide the selection past what you want – then overshoot as you slide the selection back to what you wanted. Don’t tell me this never happens to you, I’ve never seen someone try to use the touch sensitive controls on this remote and not overshoot at least a couple of times.
So, use the up/down/left/right buttons on the convex circle surrounding the centre button, yes?
You could try. But these are touch sensitive too – AS WELL AS BEING CLICKABLE. So yet again it is quite easy to try and click up, down, left, or right and accidentally also activate the touch sensitivity to over shoot.
But even more likely is that in pressing one of these U/D/L/R buttons – which are visually marked but not tactile – you’ll also either nudge the central button down (selecting something by mistake) or brush the button and activate it’s touch sensitivity, moving the selection past what you were trying to more specifically select with the UDLR buttons.
FUCK ME I FUCKING HATE IT.
That’s the top half – what about the buttons below? These are still nowhere near tactile enough to know for sure what button you’re touching without glancing to check. The BACK button is concave, the rest are all flat. And the volume buttons are at the top and bottom of a long button, so these three buttons should theoretically be easy enough to identify by touch.
Except…
One problem I have constantly is that the BACK button is not the most used button when I’m watching something – the PLAY/PAUSE button is far more valuable to be able to find easily. But the BACK button is the only one that’s easily found by a thumb, and therefore most likely to be pressed when what I really want is to pause something.
It’s also much too close to the buttons around it – the ‘down’ button on the circular control above it, the HOME button to its right, and the PLAY/PAUSE button below it. Making it all too often the button I hit when I’m trying to play or pause, or when I’m trying to navigate through playback menus (to bring up subtitles) or simply navigating a menu of things to watch.
I am so fucking fed up of CONSTANTLY clicking BACK by mistake just by picking this fucking thing up sometimes, let alone trying to use the other buttons.
Generally I can’t think of a time the touch sensitivity of Apple’s remotes has been a good thing. It’s never been accurate, it’s never been helpful, it’s always been infuriating.
And all the other buttons are too flat, too close together, too indistinguishable, generally all too easily triggered by mistake. And the most important button (PLAY/PAUSE) is not the most easily identified.
Apple designers: I hate your AppleTV remotes with a fury that burns hotter than the fucking sun. I know you will never fix this because you put ‘small’ and ‘touch sensitive’ way, way, WAY higher on your design priorities than usability, the same as you don’t seem to care that your own mice are completely unusable while they’re charging (truly the stupidest design for a mouse I have EVER seen).
But a man can dream.