June 8, 2008
Apple TV Gripes
I’ve had my Apple TV for a few months now, and overall I’m quite happy with my purchase.
So yes, that brings me up to, um, several Apple devices in the house. Macbook Pro, iPhone, 30GB iPod, two Apple wireless routers, and the Apple TV. Add in my lady’s Macbook and iPod Nano, and Apple is certainly well-represented under our roof.
That being said, I’m not such a drooling fanboy that I can’t offer critiques, complaints, or wish-lists for things I wish my Apple devices should do or should do better.
Currently tops on my gripe list is the way movies for rent or purchase are organized on the Apple TV.
The initial set of menus is fine; Top Movies, Genres, All HD, Search, Trailers and My Movies. Awesome. I’m down with that.
But drill down into Top Movies, Genres or All HD and everything just goes wrong.
Let’s say you’re in the mood for some laughs. Genres > Comedy. Easy enough.
The first thing you’re hit with is “Top Rentals”. Okay, whatever. I don’t really care, but that’s fine. Next up is “Top Sales”. Who cares? “Just Added” follows. All right, I’ll go for that. Then you get a specialty list from somebody’s list of top movies in the genre. Reasonable.
Finally, the meat-and-potatoes: the list of all available movies. The interface is pretty enough, but you only get to see the title floating below the cover shot when you navigate the on-screen pointer over that movie.
I get it, but here’s my problem: sometimes the type on the cover is small, and when you’re dealing with pixels on a screen that’s not enormous (we’ve got a 30″ Samsung HDTV, which is sufficient for a small New York apartment), I often don’t know what I’m looking at.
I would like to see the text as well as the box shot. That way I can more quickly and easily scan the list to see what’s what.
It’s a relatively minor gripe, but for a company like Apple that puts so much emphasis on elegance in their user interface, this should be addressed. I would think a simple “View Options” in the menu, similar to the one in the Mac OS, would address this issue quite easily. List View, View Icons, View Icons and Titles. Done.
But the bigger issue for me is the “Just Added” list in “Top Movies.” Don’t go here looking for new releases. This list merely represents movies that have been added to the iTunes catalog.
There is no way to view movies by release date, and there is no separate list for new releases. This is highly annoying. In this regard I greatly prefer browsing movies on Time Warner’s Movies On Demand channel.
As ugly as the interface is, the menu system is well-designed. The options: “Last Chance”, “All New”, “DVD Releases”, “Early Screening”, and so on.
Here’s where Apple could/should learn from the cable and satellite TV companies. “All New” is just that: new movies that have been released for rental. Not older catalog titles.
Why not separate out just-added catalog titles from just-added new releases? If I’m looking for something new to watch, I don’t want to see Short Circuit and Semi-Pro in the same list. If I want something older, I’ll browse that list.
This is actually so frustrating that often I will browse the new releases on cable, then switch over to Apple TV once I’ve picked out what I want.
Now, I know I could pull up the movies in iTunes, do an advanced search, and sort the results by release date. But why should I have to do that?
C’mon, Apple. Surely it can’t be that hard to tweak the menu options so that users can get more out of the Apple TV experience.
Check out my site, Retired Time Bomb.
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