Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder how many people proclaiming that "Apple just gets it" have actually used the remote in question rather than looking at its (admittedly gorgeous) picture. We have one of the previous generation Apple TV's with a very similar remote. It currently sits unplugged next to the television on top of an upturned yogurt container.

It's on the yogurt container because its lack of vents causes it to overheat if sitting on a smooth surface. It's unplugged because there's no clear power button on its very stylish remote. I happen to know that if you hold down one of the keys long enough it will turn (mostly) off, but I don't think this knowledge is shared by others in the house. It needs to be turned off because of the whine of the harddrive and the aforementioned overheating problem.

Using the remote to enter search terms for Youtube is possible, but is a dreaded chore. Generally one says "Here, let me show you something" and then has to call the other party back from another room when done with the laborious process. This is not attempted as much as when the device was new. A keyboard as a remote may look silly, but would at least make simple things like this possible.

Overall, it's very cute and warm little boat anchor. We'll probably eventually manage to get Boxee installed on it, but the lack of a reasonable means of entering text will really limit its utility. So while I agree that Apple "really gets it", at least in this case I'd apply this solely to their marketing rather than their usability.

Amen: the Apple remote is /ludicrous/. The original poster also was talking about how great it is for being small... it isn't like the people who make television remotes couldn't easily make them smaller: if you take one apart you realize they are almost entirely hollow.

The real world use case for a remote involves grasping it in your hand, which is not even remotely comfortable to do with the Apple remote. Meanwhile, I normally can't even find the thing, because it is so irritatingly small, thin, smooth, and tapered that it is constantly lost: it slides under papers, falls into the couch, or even manages to disappear into your own lap.

This simply isn't a remote that a normal person can use.

Frankly, the more I deal with people who insist "Apple is for end users" the more I realize that these people don't even understand what an end user is. Instead, these people are all geeks who happen to be geeky in the same way the product designers at Apple are, and therefore they get turned on by the same ludicrously ineffective-for-actual-end-users design choices that Apple often ends up making.

(By the way, it isn't usually holding one button: the Apple remote has a bunch of "secret" combo pushes that involve holding down two buttons at once for at least 6 seconds and then letting go. Rather than add buttons to a design, Apple prefers forcing users to remember large numbers of obscure gestures and modifiers keys, and the Apple remote is no different.)

I really like how the Boxee Box team approached the "simple remote vs. youtube searching" problem. Their remote has two sides. On the top is a four-way directional pad, a select, and a menu/back button. On the bottom is a full, cell-phone style keyboard. I think it's the best of both worlds.

> Using the remote to enter search terms for Youtube is possible, but is a dreaded chore.

This is exactly what Apple is trying to tell: searching on TV is not what consumers want. If you ask me as a consumer, searching on TV just does not makes sense. I would search on my ipod and just tell my TV to show things I found.

This reminds me of reviews when first iPhone was released. One the problems reported was that it does not have all kind of ring levels as Nokia ("meeting", "silence", "vibrate and ring", etc.). And what actually people like me want is just silence and not.

But how would you tell your TV what to show you? I'm not talking about spending the evening lounging around searching for interesting things on the web. I'm talking about the 2 minutes to enter "Vienna Vegetable Orchestra" so you can find the video that you already know about.

Do you have one of these that you happily use? Are you referring to using the iPod as a remote to directly control it instead of the included remote? If so, and if you've got this working, I can agree with you that this is a much better model for operation.

I generally use the aluminum remote to control my Apple TV, and the Remote app on my iPhone to type stuff, because typing is ridiculously tedious with the remote. But I don't need to type all that often, so it's an OK tradeoff. Most of the things I want to do on my ATV don't involve typing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com