This Remote Has Me Questioning Everything
I recently lost my Apple TV remote (the latest model) and despite apparently being somewhere in the couch according to Find My, my wife and I can not find it. We were using our phones as remotes for a couple days, which was annoying, but got the job done. But then I was doing something random with the TVs standard remote and for whatever reason I had the Apple TV on screen and used my Hisense remote to arrow around. To my surprise, it totally worked.
I’m sure this is a well-known thing, but I just hadn’t thought about my TV remote being able to control the UI of my Apple TV. I assume this is something to do with ARC over HDMI or something, but whatever the reason it works!
Now, I expected for this to feel like a stopgap until we found the actual Apple TV remote, but I actually really like using this compared to the Apple TV’s real remote. It feels better in the hand, the buttons are more satisfying to press, the buttons are less prone to accidental presses, there’s no trackpad I can accidentally brush and select the wrong thing, and the button layout is more logical to me. Seriously, I’ve been using the redesigned Apple TV remote since 2021 and I still have to look at it to remember where the mute and play buttons are because they’re not where I’d expect. 4 years of use and it’s still not muscle memory!
I stand by my original assessment that even the revised Siri Remote is just not very good.
Previously:
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ARC is for audio channel return, I think he means HDMI-CEC which is for controlling other devices over HDMI. Also of note, the older pre iOS Apple TVs had a mode where you could take any remote and program the Apple TV to work with any random remote. So like the reverse of a programmable remote. Not sure if the newer iOS TV models still work that way.
I recently bought an Apple TV 4K to replace my Roku Ultra, since it just wasn’t working that well.
Apple TV does have a feature allowing it to learn the IR signals from other remotes. I tried it with my receiver remote but ended up not using it because the directional buttons would always move two spaces instead of one. Maybe retraining it could fix it, but I might just get a universal remote instead.
While the Apple TV remote could be better, my TV’s remote has dozens of buttons, many of which I do not want to accidentally hit. Even though it was a pretty expensive TV, the remote is optimized for engagement and ad revenue for the TV manufacturer.
The Apple TV remote has only the buttons I care about.
@Nate Yeah, I don’t think the Apple TV remote needs a lot more buttons. It’s mostly the layout and feel that bother me.
After years, I finally "cut the cable" from Spectrum. Still learning things. I now stream (yeah, a few months ago I used cable boxes) through dedicated (?) Apple TVs to my televisions. Bought identical bluetooth remotes (Function 101) for each and am quite happy with them.
Downsides:
-- I *really* miss the previous channel button.
My workaround is using a second device (usually a laptop) for sports, and the (app-specific) DVR function for other programming. Speaking of....
-- The lack of simply using the forward/reqind buttons for the DVR programs. It works, but again, it depends on which app I used. In some it means going in 10/20/30 second increments, in others it simply doesn't work. But it's not the remote.
-- To navigate from, say, one local channel 12 to local channel 35 means using the guide, as Apple TV hardware doesn't use number buttons.
Upsdes:
-- Replacing the "swipe" actions of the touch control with actual buttons. Enough said... not a big fan of swiping on a remote the size of a stick of gum.
-- Beyond what I noted above, these remotes have power, menu, arrow, select, volume and mute buttons. The bluetooth took some setup (to my Sony TVs, not the apple TVs) and have work flawlessly since. More, they are paired to each TV and identical, which my Sony remotes aren't.
The first IR white plastic remote that also worked with Mac mini was really simple and good. It’s been all downhill from there.
I prefer the dumb Chromecast approach where I select what I want to watch on my phone and then send it over to the TV. Maybe this only works because I don't have any traditional tv channels at all.
The Apple TV remote had a lot of good aspects to it, but was overall ruined by the bad ones. Probably the best part was how long it would stay charged, which was fantastic. I also loved the visual feedback you got using the trackpad on the Apple TV, with menu items shifting slightly -- that was really innovative. It's just too bad it failed as some really basic things like the button layout being crap and not being able to tell which way it was oriented just by feel.
But for a while I made very good use of the remote:
I've had a rule for my media center that I want to have one remote that controlled the whole thing and all devices / interfaces on it, it had to be simple (so no god awful universal remotes with 50 buttons that no one would ever in their right mind be able to figure out), it had to use physical buttons so it was useful while watching the TV (so no using smart phone universal remote apps), and it had to work as consistently as possible. This was not only for my own sensibilities, but for the sake of my friends and family too who would never be able to figure a damn thing out if there were four remotes each corresponding to different devices, that all had to be used in some arcane configuration.
I actually managed to set everything up with my Apple TV as the main "hub" of my media center, with different apps that could be used to switch TV inputs, and then the Apple TV remote would keep working for whichever device it switched to. The home button always took you back to the Apple TV. It took quite a bit of work, but I managed it! And the great thing about the Apple TV remote was that, when it switched to an HTPC, the remote worked for both browsing a 10-foot interface as well as controlling the mouse cursor on the desktop using its built-in trackpad. No other remote would let me do that.
I've since abandoned that whole setup though because a) the buttons and layout of the Apple TV remote still suck, b) it became too much of a pain in the ass to customize my Apple TV in any significant way whatsoever thanks to Apple's onerous restrictions, and c) I don't really use my TV for anything other than the occasional video games these days so it's no longer worth the effort.
