Thicker. Chunkier. Perfect.
Apple’s 2021 Siri Remote begins the process of making amends of over a half-decade of frustration.
By now, you must have stumbled across at least someone online absolutely gushing about the latest Siri Remote for the AppleTV. This well-deserved unanimous praise comes from the fact that the Siri Remote is excellent. FINALLY! Navigation and controls are intuitive, and it's far more ergonomic and comfortable to hold and operate. But another reason for the high praise comes partially from the fact that the previous generation of the Siri Remote that we tolerated for more than half a decade was horrible. The outgoing Siri remote had so many strikes against it: an uncomfortable form factor, fragile glass trackpad, problems orienting it, frequent unintended trackpad presses, and challenges with precise input.
Having ordered the new remote when it became available, I also wanted to add my thoughts to the compendium of perspectives about this latest redesign.
From left to right:
1st generation Apple Remote was released in 2007 and came included with the first-generation Apple TV, iPod Hifi, Apple Universal Dock, and Mac computers. It also was sold separately for $29.
2nd generation Apple Remote came bundled with the second-generation Apple TV & Universal Dock in 2010. It was sold separately for $19.
1st generation Siri Remote was released in October 2015 with the release of the 4th generation Apple TV. It sold for $79.
Updated 1st generation Siri Remote released in 2017 with the release of the Apple TV 4K. It added attritional motion input, a white plastic ring around the menu button and dropped the price to $59.
2nd generation Siri Remote released in April 2021. It is currently available for $59.
Form
This remote ain't pretty! Let me back up. The Siri Remote it's a good-looking remote by the standards of almost any other remote out there. Still, compared to Apple's typical industrial design and their previous generation remote, the Siri Remote looks quite industrial & considerably less refined. It seems like the nondescript illustration you find in a patent filing provides a vague sense of what the product is without spoiling the final design. If you only glanced at this remote next to the previous generation, I can't accept that most people would think it's aesthetically preferable over the outgoing model.
2010 called, and they want their design language back! Curved aluminum, black Apple logo… the new Siri Remote is giving off some strong first-generation iPad vibes.
Function
Just how much Apple doubled down on creating a remote that functions so much better than the previous Siri Remote is intriguing. There is no technical reason for why this remote needed to be as thick, tall, and chunky as it ended up being. Instead, its design appears intended to compliment the environment and ergonomics of how it will be used. The remote feels like a rare example of Apple devoting 90% of its focus on utility and 10% to aesthetic considerations. Some have speculated whether this redesign signals a sea-change at Apple, which seems a polite way of saying "a product designed after Jony Ive departed Apple," but I have no way of knowing if that's the case.
The new remote's larger size also makes locating, picking up, and holding it far more comfortable than any previous remote from Apple. There is no ambivalence orienting it either. You can blindly pick it up and know in a second if you have it oriented correctly. This wasn't true with the previous remote, which I would constantly pick up by the glass trackpad and inadvertently end up pausing, fast-forwarding or backtracking through whatever I was watching. Apple tried to fix this by later adding a more identifiable white plastic ring around the Menu button, a move that seemed to highlight just how out-of-touch they appeared to be with what was bothering people about this trackpad remote to begin with.
Buttons
The Click-Wheel Trackpad: Apple knocked it out of the park by incorporating three different and complementary technologies into their click-wheel trackpad. Direction buttons. A touch-sensitive trackpad. A scroll wheel. These are not three separate input devices. This is one device! And the result is a remote that makes navigation effortless and nearly flawless.
It would be a struggle to reliably trigger the interaction I wanted to perform with the previous remote. I would end up overshooting menu items, fail to skip back 15 seconds in a clip, or run out of trackpad when scrolling through a video. All of this has been remedied with the new Siri Remote. Direction buttons are perfect for a more precise and fine-tuned selection of items. The touch-sensitive trackpad is ideal for more significant navigation across the interface. And the scroll wheel that iPod faithful grew up on now provides infinite and effortless scrolling through movies with fine-grained navigation. All three peacefully coexist in the top navigation area as a single surface, allowing me to select just the right navigation style I want for the operation I'm trying to perform. Just perfect!
Back Button: I am so happy Apple changed 'Menu' to the 'Back' but. I might be inflexible, I might be dumb, but I could never compute what exactly pressing the "Menu" button would do. To Apple, Menu had always meant "back to the previous screen," but I would continue to push it, expecting to be taken back to the Home Screen or the beginning of whatever app I was in.
Other:
I have no strong opinions about the lack of a U1 chip in the remote. It feels like an obvious missed opportunity, and Apple's response that people won't lose this remote because of its size smells of bad specious reasoning.
I have a gripe with the mute button being the bottommost button on the remote and would have preferred Apple keep the Play/Pause button located there instead. I'm far more likely to want to pause than mute someone, so having it remain the bottommost button makes more sense to my use case.
I wish it were possible to use the iPod-like scroll wheel for infinite scrolling through long horizontal or vertical lists. Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be possible with the exception of jogging through the timeline of a video.
No strong opinions about the Siri button. I've honestly invoked Siri less than a dozen times in my entire history of owning an AppleTV, half of them unintentional. If the Apple missed adding a Siri function to this remote, I doubt I would notice.
The addition of the power button makes this remote even more intuitive and convenient for those who want to make this remote the single input device for their home theatre.
