Week in Review - The Apple TV feels stuck in forever-beta

Saturday, June 13, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about how platform curation wasn’t impacting all platforms equally. This week, I’m taking a look at one of Apple’s most frustrating products.

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The big story

As Apple prepares for a virtual WWDC and a host of announcements about the future of their hardware and software platforms, I’m very curious what the future holds for a product that feels like it’s been in beta its entire life: the Apple TV.

Apple never made a television, instead settling for a TV box they would later spend hundreds of millions to fill with their own TV shows. Apple TV has always been an experiment for the company, and it’s one of the least intuitive products that Apple has ever built. For a company that has often taken great pride in creating products that are “so easy to use, a child can figure it out,” I am often blown away by how disjointed the experience is.

Part of that is because Apple TV plays to few of Apple’s strengths and takes away the one thing they need to succeed, control.

Apple platforms are great when the company is operating with end-to-end control, but the Apple TV only has a cursory grasp on either end of the TV-watching experience. Apple TV is stuck inside a world that’s been filling with incredibly bad smart TVs that are going out of their way to push their experience on you. Meanwhile, tvOS is a software experience that can’t accept that it isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. People care about access to the apps of individual streaming services and system-wide search that kicks ass, but Apple has instead opted for the long game, building out a TV app that’s short on a few too many platform partnerships, rendering it a distraction that poisons the whole experience.

System-wide search is just bad and leads me to dumbing down request after request in hopes of getting the desired result. Airplay is getting much less bad than it once was, but the company still struggles with basic interoperability tasks like connecting my TV to my stereo HomePods which I have to reconnect every single time. The remote is very pretty but is also very confusing and I can’t begin to imagine explaining to my grandma how do anything with it when I myself am Googling how to switch from fullscreen to widescreen on a near-weekly basis.

I have few doubts that Apple’s ideal TV experience would be wonderful if they controlled all of the content, all of the apps and shipped it on a TV that they built themselves, but absent that royal flush of control, I don’t really know what the consumer advantage of the Apple TV is, especially as they begin shipping their content into other smart TV ecosystems.

Startup on the right foot

Trends of the week

Snapchat is filling their app with mini apps
Snapchat seems to be taking a note from Wechat, announcing this week that they would begin partnering with third party developers to release lightweight versions of apps that Snapchat users can quickly launch inside the app’s Chat section. Read more here.

Just Eat Takeaway is buying Grubhub
Rumors of X-company buying Grubhub have been swirling around for years at this point, but a deal was finally announced this week when Europe’s Just Eat Takeaway announced that they were planning to acquire the food delivery platform for $7.3 billion beating out Uber for the deal. Read more about it here.

HBO attempts to simplify its Now/Max/Go naming scheme
HBO has had issues with marketing ever since it decided to give an online platform with the same content two different names. Fast forward to the weeks following the release of HBO Max and the company is realizing that the may have a marketing problem on their hands. Read more here.

COVID-19

Moderna set to start final-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine by July

Cue Health's portable, fast COVID-19 test gains FDA emergency approval

Tech giants must open up about the coronavirus 'infodemic', say EU lawmakers

Theaters are ready to reopen, but is America ready to go back to the movies?

Image Credits: MIGUEL MEDINA / Getty Images

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