The Apple TV’s touchpad is smudging and missing a good remote

It’s rare to find a button almost universally hated, but the infamous touchpad on the Apple TV’s Siri Remote may be an exception. Even more than half a year after its introduction, it is one of the most maligned hardware out there.

The Apple TV remote’s shortcomings stem not only from a bad touchpad (and don’t get me wrong: it’s bad) but from a greater misunderstanding about Apple’s side of what makes a good remote and the fundamental purpose of those devices.

The typical TV remote is big and ugly, but it’s also extremely easy to find and navigate thanks to different button patterns that make it clear what you’re touching, even without checking. Overall, no one has ever been more confused about how to find the giant rubber seesaw with “VOLUME” or what the huge, often glowing red power button does.

Apple’s remotes have always been much simpler and smaller, but the older models still had separate buttons for important functions such as navigation and playback. And crucially, you could tell them apart.

But the so-called Siri Remote broke from those designs when it was introduced alongside the fourth-generation Apple TV in 2015. The new Apple TV was the biggest overhaul of Apple’s set-top box ambitions to date, with the introduction of the tvOS platform, an app. Store and aim to become a one stop shop for all your TV needs.

The remote control is designed to complement those ambitions. Most notably, the directional pad was removed and replaced with a bland touch pad intended to better mimic the touchscreens on iPhones and iPads. After all, the Apple TV could now run iOS-style apps, so it likely needed an iOS-style operating system.

But in pursuit of the smartphone experience, Apple lost sight of the key elements of a good TV remote. The slimmed-down glass and aluminum design of the Siri Remote looked fantastic. In practice, however, the tiny remote was even easier to get rid of than its already tiny predecessors, with a design that appears to be tailor-made to slip between sofa seats and under cushions.

The minimalist design reduced the remote control to just a few buttons, but the near-symmetrical layout made it nearly impossible to distinguish between those buttons in the dark (for example, when watching a movie). Pick up the remote the wrong way, and instead of hitting the Play / Pause button to stop your show, you can hit the TV button – which takes you out of the show and into Apple’s overcrowded TV app is going.

Add software updates that changed what those buttons actually do (the TV button used to work as a home button until Apple released the TV app in 2019), and it’s another indictment of the remote’s chase to form-over -function. Even Apple seems to be aware of this: when it revamped the Siri remote for the fifth-generation Apple TV 4K, it added a white ring to the menu button to make it a little easier to see which way is up.

And then there is the touchpad. Since only its matte texture serves to distinguish it from the remote’s glossy grip, it suffers from the same orientation issues as the other buttons. Pick up the remote the wrong way, and you’ll either sweep on useless glass if you wanted to move through the OS or work your way through a show just grabbing the remote.

Even if you can orient it properly, the overly sensitive and opaque nature of the touchpad makes it easy to skim through what you were trying to do in the first place. In theory, the touchpad is a useful tool for playing games, swiping through pages of apps, and effortlessly scrolling through a Netflix show. In practice, it is terrible with almost all those tasks.

The remote is such a problem that when Swiss TV and Internet provider Salt began offering Apple TVs as set-top boxes, it partnered with Apple to create a simpler, more traditional remote for customers. One of the biggest changes is the switch from the touchpad to a regular, rubber D-pad. The touchpad promises limitless functionality, but it’s so difficult to use that one less versatile input method is actually more useful. (The $ 20 Salt remotes routinely sell on eBay for nearly triple their value to unsatisfied customers in other markets.)

But for all these problems, the Siri Remote malfunctions all stem from a common cause: the smartphone authentication of the traditional TV remote. The sleek design and touchpad interface have helped make the original iPhone hugely successful. But for a TV remote – a device that should be easily found in a sea of ​​cushions and simply function without having to tear your eyes off the latest episode of The Mandalorian – they are exactly the wrong properties.

Apple has created a remote that is an undeniably beautiful piece of hardware. How many TV remotes other than the Siri Remote can claim to actually look like goodBut the touchpad’s minimalism and misguided attempt to try and turn the entire remote into something not like other failed Apple buttons before it: a stark warning of the dangers of chasing form over function.