The New Siri Remote
The all-new Siri Remote features an innovative clickpad control that offers five-way navigation for better accuracy, and is also touch-enabled for the fast directional swipes Apple TV users love. The outer ring of the clickpad supports an intuitive circular gesture that turns it into a jog control — perfect for finding a scene in a movie or show. And with its one-piece aluminum design, the new Siri Remote fits more comfortably in a user’s hand.
It feels a little silly to be commending something as primitive as a TV remote, but the new Siri Remote deserves it. When Apple responded to the butterfly keyboard backlash, they simply reverted back to a tried-and-trusted design. The Magic Keyboard in the 2019 MacBook Pro was near-identical to what they shipped before — prior to the butterfly fiasco that is. It was a crowd pleaser but also a little boring. Had they really learned nothing in that four year span of misery?
The new Siri Remote is not retracing the past. It’s a robust combination of the Apple Infrared Remote and the trackpad Siri Remote, squarely addressing the failings of the latter. There’s no glass surface anymore, so it should be more durable and not prone to breaking upon being dropped or knocked off the coffee table. There’s asymmetry that you can feel with your fingers, so your brain can know which way is up just by touch. There is a physical D-Pad arrangement with labelled indicators, so you can do traditional up-right-left-down navigation like every other TV remote on the planet. And yet, at the same time, Apple didn’t lose the best bit of the trackpad: the ability to swipe the trackpad to zoom through a list of items. The circular D-Pad doubles as a capacitive touch surface (the “clickpad” as named by Apple marketing) so you can still do the same gestures on it. A new innovation: if you move your finger in a circular motion around the outer edge, it scrubs through the playing video just like an iPod clickwheel.
One let down is the lack of Find My integration, or even a simple beeper so you can make it ping if you misplace it. The omission of this functionality was made only more stark by the fact Apple chose this same event to sing the item-finding praises of the long-rumoured AirTag tracker. This remote should be harder to lose though; it is less likely to fall down a sofa simply because it is bigger and chunkier. Switching from an all-black finish to silver aluminium also makes it easier to see in the dark.
The other let down is the price: $59 for a remote is exorbitantly high. You can buy an entire Chromecast for less than the price of the Siri Remote. Unfortunately, the entire Apple TV product remains poorly priced. They refreshed the Apple TV 4K’s internals with an A12 chip, but it’s still sold at the same $179 price point and more ridiculously still, the Apple TV HD remains on sale — hardware unchanged aside from bundling the new remote — for the same (inflated) price it debuted at in 2015.
The A12 chip and the overhauled Remote do just enough to serve as a signal that Apple is committed to keeping the Apple TV around. I can allay my fears about its discontinuation. But clearly, there’s a lot more to be done in the living room and I hope Apple has more coming down the pipe in both hardware and software.