The New Siri Remote

I was frequently annoyed by the old Siri Remote, but I didn’t loathe it like a lot of people did. The trackpad wasn’t all that precise and did occasionally result in unintended input, I did occasionally pick it up upside down, and it was fragile, but overall I thought that Siri and the swiping gestures genuinely added to the tvOS experience. That said, the new Siri Remote is a delight to use, and a vast improvement over its predecessor.

The new design is a lot more robust and sturdy. It’s made out of aluminum, rather than glass on the top, and the design is a bit thicker and heavier. It’s easier to pick up off of a table, and impossible to pick up backwards without realizing it.

There are also some changes to the buttons. The addition of a mute button wasn’t my favorite, and I could’ve done without it (especially since they put it in the same place as the old play/pause button; there have been several times where I mean to pause a show and don’t notice until a few minutes later that I’d just muted it). However, the other button they added was a power button, and while it isn’t very aesthetically pleasing, it works well and it’s simple. No more aimless trackpad clicking or button pressing to turn the tv on, no more pressing and holding and then swiping and clicking to turn it off. You just press the power button and it turns on or off. As for the Siri button, it has been relocated to the side of the remote. At first I didn’t really care either way about this, but in practice, I think this is actually worse. I can see the reasoning behind having the Siri button in a separate location from all the playback control buttons, but it wasn’t a good ergonomic choice to put it on the side. It’s awkward to press with your thumb, and it requires completely changing your grip on the remote.

But let’s talk about the buttons that people care most about: the circular trackpad and directional buttons, which Apple calls the “clickpad with touch surface.” This element makes the new Siri remote perhaps the best TV remote control I’ve ever used. They preserved the ability to quickly swipe through menus, and did it all on top of a functioning, clicky d-pad. The clickpad with touch surface is comprised of two separate surfaces, the outer ring and the center circle. The center circle functions as a “select” button, while the outer ring can be pressed up, down, left, and right for situations where more granular navigation is preferable to quick swipes. As far as the actual swiping goes, you can swipe on any portion of the clickpad with touch surface. The two discrete surfaces act as one large touchpad, meaning you can begin swiping on the far left edge of the outer ring (not touching the center circle), traverse the left side of the ring, then the center circle, and all the way over the right edge of the outer ring, and it will result in the remote recognizing one long swipe, rather than three distinct instances of the different touch surfaces receiving electrostatic input (even though that’s what’s technically happening).

When Apple introduced the new remote, they showed off a feature where you can use the outer ring of the clickpad just like an iPod click wheel to precisely scrub through videos. This works well, but it was a little difficult to discover (you first have to pause the video, then briefly rest your finger on the outer ring before beginning the circular gesture). For some reason, many people believed the outer ring was also capable of quickly scrolling down lists, like a playlist or settings menu, but this just isn’t the case, unfortunately. Trying to do so results in your selection moving up the list while your finger moves up on the outer ring, and then beginning to move back down the list as your finger rounds the top of the ring and begins traveling down the other side again. (This proves that the outer ring is a part of the whole touch surface, which was a point of confusion among many reviewers.)

It sucks that the remote doesn’t include the U1 chip so that you can use precision finding to locate it if it walks off or gets lost in the couch, and there’s really no good reason it couldn’t have included it. It’s also (slightly) disappointing that Apple removed the accelerometer and gyroscope. As much as they’ve focused on Apple Arcade, it’s curious that they would ship a remote that is incompatible with the vast majority of games available for tvOS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not devastated — most games for Apple TV suck anyway — but if you’re someone who liked them, then this would be frustrating.

Overall, even though it’s not a perfect remote for a few reasons, it’s so much better and more fun than the last one that I would definitely recommend it to anyone with an Apple TV. It costs $59, so if you have an Apple TV HD, you may be better off upgrading your whole system, but if you have the first generation Apple TV 4K, you can’t go wrong by just upgrading to this remote.