Why Does My Apple TV Suck?

It has been almost fifteen years since I moved from the Microsoft world to the Mac world. At this point basically all my computing products are Apple. While I would argue that I’m no fanboy, I’m sure I still have friends who would say otherwise.

Apple products have been more pleasing for me to use than the alternatives. Based on my service usage, a year or two ago it became financially beneficial for me to move off Spotify and to Apple Music via the Apple One product. As the years went on I’ve been happy with the quality of Apple Music’s streams. I’ve enjoyed Spatial Audio (née Dolby Atmos), listening in my home theater. Lots of good things!

A big downside this past year for me has been my simultaneous movement from Spotify + Sonos Connect:Amps to Apple Music + Apple TV. What’s been particularly frustrating is that many of these complaints, when shared with friends, sounded unique to me. As in they are having almost none of these troubles. Let’s run down my challenges:

• The remote sucks. (Okay, everyone does agree with this one.) Posting this indicates that I’m on the prior generation of the Apple TV. It’s so bad.
• Apple Music just stops playing from time-to-time; it hiccups, becomes non-responsive, etc. This isn’t necessarily an Apple-TV-only problem as I’ve experienced Apple Music hiccups on iOS and macOS (oh goodness does that app needs to be made better).
• The Apple TV in our living room requires a restart approximately every day we try to use it. Various things happen:
  • Apple Music doesn’t want to play. (Other symptoms will be a lack of album art.)
  • A streaming app will not fully load. An example is just staring at a purple HBO Max screen without even a logo on it.
  • Starting a Photos slideshow is unpossible.
• Even though I ask the Apple TV to pull down new screensavers every week, I never get a screensaver other than the Los Angeles fly by, and even that appears to be cut short.
• I’m logged out of services entirely too frequently. Netflix seems to be logged out almost every time I want to use it. Same with channel streams like TBS and TNT. Again, this might not be Apple, but it seems awfully frequent across multiple services.
• The Apple TV in our living room variably works with ARC. Sometimes turning it on also turns on the television. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it turns on the A/V receiver. Sometimes it doesn’t. Again, this might not be Apple’s problem.

I experience many of these things across multiple Apple TVs. Reading through these bullets, I think I should check the storage space on the devices. I don’t load much on them at all, but perhaps Photos could be acting silly? It seems I shouldn’t be using more than a quarter of the available storage. Another thing I might try is full factory resets of the devices.

But as any good Apple “fanboy” would do, my next thought is to replace the Apple TVs with a newer version. I hate myself for thinking this, but it is the quickest way that could possibly work. Changing setups and/or services is a much more involved process. And at least I’ll get a better remote out of the deal.