Apple TV review: The good, the bad and the ugly – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
The new Apple TV brings powerful new features.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
The new Apple TV looks like the old one, but it’s a complete overhaul of the little black puck. It now comes with a full-blown App Store, a touch-sensitive remote and voice controls via Siri.
You can preorder it now, and it’ll ship Friday.
We got our hands on a developer model and have been playing around with it. We like it a lot. Setup is fun, the interface looks stunning, and the touch remote works beautifully. If the Music app is any indication, apps on this thing are going to be great. There’s just one little thing wrong. And it’s not little, actually. It’s big.
Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about the 4th-generation Apple TV.
The new Apple TV’s UI is simple and striking.
Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac
Apple gave some developers early access to the new Apple TV so they could get their software ready for the new tvOS App Store. Unfortunately, there’s no App Store yet, but we gave the built-in apps a good tire-kicking.
We watched movies and TV shows from the online iTunes store, loaded Photos from our photo stream and explored the fantastic Music app, which is sweeeeeet. We watched, mesmerized, as the fantastic aerial screensavers played time after time. And we did a lot of talking to Siri, which you’ll hear about in a bit.
All in all, we got a pretty good picture of how the new Apple TV works.
Setup is the best yet
Setup of the new Apple TV is so easy, you barely need the remote. It’ll pull settings right off your iPhone.
Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac
The new Apple TV brings a vastly improved setup procedure. Instead of jumping through screen after screen, laboriously entering all your passwords, the new device can be paired with an iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth. It then copies your Wi-Fi and Apple ID settings. Admittedly, it didn’t work the first time we did it, but it did the second time, and I was just delighted!
Performance: New Apple TV is snappy
The new hardware is fast and fluid. The surprisingly small motherboard holds a 64-bit, dual-core A8 processor, a super-speedy little monster that debuted in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (now a generation behind the new 6s).
The chip is a screamer, and runs hot, so the new box is about half as tall again as the old one (iFixit’s teardown shows the increased size accommodates a giant heat sink). The small set-top box boasts 2 GB of RAM, also a step up from the previous version.
It’s not just the chips, though. Networking is fast. The new Apple TV utilizes the fastest Wi-Fi currently available (802.11ac) as well as Bluetooth 4.0 and an IR receiver. It’s not clear yet what the IR receiver is for — the remote works over Bluetooth. (I…
https://www.cultofmac.com/393941/4th-generation-apple-tv-review/
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