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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

The AppleTV works great, and you can switch the Home Screen from “grid of apps” to “TV Guide”. The only service that doesn’t seem to participate in Apple’s aggregation among the services I use is Netflix.

Also the Emby app is decent.

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I read that you now need to have an iDevice to use Apple TV, which would make it a bad experience for those not in the Apple Ecosystem. [1]

[1] "The Apple TV expects you to have an iPhone in order to accept new iCloud terms and conditions": https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/16/apple-tv-iphone-required/

I believe that's since been fixed.

Never affected me here in the UK. We are an Android household but have an AppleTV which has continued to work perfectly. Very happy with it.

I've used an AppleTV almost daily for several years, ever since the first ads appeared in my Roku, and I've never heard of this 'tv guide mode'. A quick google didn't find much, so I'm sure it's got some other strange Apple-branded name. I'll look for it next time.

I'm referring to the "TV" app, which aggregates content from all of your streaming services, or, at least the ones that participate in Apple's aggregation program like Apple TV+, Hulu, HBO. The article refers to this cross-vendor aggregation as "TV Guide".

Ah; that isn't something you can "switch the Home Screen to", though.

I agree - Apple TV is very tolerable. Most importantly it's fairly robust.

Its pretty good overall. My two complaints:

- It bugs out on 5.1 dolby audio with my attached sonos soundbar. I very frequently need to either restart all devices or force stereo to get any audio, especially on netflix/hbo/disney

- Its not screen time integrated for kids. I can setup profiles but they do almost nothing useful.

How do you switch the Home Screen to TV guide? I googled this but couldn’t find it.

Apple TV is by far the worst streaming box. It's only barely tolerable if you are part of the Apple ecosystem, which most of the world is not part of.

Navigation sucks. Definitely a case of neither form, nor function, guiding the UX experience. Navigation is inconsistent within the interface itself, and Apple forces services to modify their interfaces to meet Apple's nonsensical requirements, so streaming service UXs on the ATV are inconsistent from every other platform for which they are available.

The Apple TV remote is alternatively too sensitive and not sensitive enough, and the Apple TV is prone to lagging, which compounds these sensitivity issues.

And profiles/multi-account management is so bad it would make Steve Jobs want to smash every ATV box into a million pieces. A child's profile has access to adult content by default which defaults the entire point of having a profile just for kids.

The appleTV is locked down and unusable for doing anything remotely interesting.

This website is "hacker news".

Hacker News is a misnomer.

Mainly it's people bitching about Apple, hawking their doomed startup, or pretending to know Rust but all of that is too much for a snappy website name.

edit: Also, sometimes people will wax poetic about a shitty project some dude did on a Thinkpad running i3.

The Apple TV works well as a consumer product though, it's reliable, it's simple to use, everyone in my house knows how to operate it, so on and so forth.

Being on Hacker News doesn't mean that every comment needs to praise how interesting technology can be, as I grow older I get a lot more value from reliable boring tech than when I was younger and riding the waves of the next Linux distro that promised me to be able to configure everything under-the-sun as I pleased.

Yeah, it might be unusable from a "hacking" perspective, it's still a great product for a streaming box that doesn't suck :)

What are you looking to do with Apple TV that you can’t do?

Yet I originally moved from roku to appletv specifically because I could sideload "real" apps much easier.

I wanted to try the Apple TV, but the interface was riddled with ads. Same issue with Roku.

I’ve seen no ads on my AppleTV, other than what apps/services show me.

However, each app in the top row gets to populate the top half of the screen with its own content. I primarily use Netflix, which just displays the shows I recently watched. Maybe other apps are showing you the ads you’re seeing?

There are no ads on my AppleTV. Maybe this depends on which apps you have installed - Apps get to put content (usually stuff you're in the middle of watching, or new shows) on the AppleTV home screen. Perhaps some are abusing this privilege?

There are no ads on the Apple TV.

What do you consider "Ads"?

Did you see new movies on different services and consider those as ads?

Or did you get ads for a new detergent and the local grocery chain?

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