Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The setup for the Apple TV itself was easy and intuitive, however, I had to do some research and experimentation to get it to work correctly with my TV (2015 Panasonic Viera) and my Denon audio receiver. This is not the fault of Apple because they support the right technology in their device. The fault was actually with the TV and receiver menus, because they’re somewhat confusing if you don’t know very much about how ARC works. I finally got all three devices to work correctly together (TV, Apple TV, and Receiver) by turning on the ARC settings on all devices, using the correct HDMI port on the TV that supports ARC, and figuring out the correct settings on my TV that allowed it to give control over to an external media device (the Apple TV). I also had to make sure that within the TV's settings, the TV's speakers weren't set as the default, otherwise after restarting everything it would default audio output to the TV instead of the receiver. With regard to the Denon receiver, to turn on ARC, I actually had to go into the receiver's settings menu under the video settings, because that's where the HDMI settings are, even though ARC stands for Audio Return Channel. On the receiver, I turned on HDMI passthrough with a pass source of “Last,” this allows me to switch between the Apple TV and a gaming console depending on which source the receiver last detected a signal from. With the PS5, for example, all I have to do is press the PlayStation button on the PlayStation controller to switch over to it, or the home button on the Apple TV remote to switch back. When everything is setup, you may need to restart the Apple TV. Now that everything is working, I can hold down the power button on the Apple TV remote in order to turn off all three devices and then turn them back on, such that the Apple TV remote is now the only remote I need. Before this upgrade, I had to keep two other bulky remotes around just for their power buttons, but now I can hide those and don’t ever need to look at them again. This Apple TV was a massive upgrade from the old one I was using, which I hadn’t upgraded since 2015. As everyone is saying, the new remote is an awesome product and the software is so much better than before. I particularly liked how easy it was to sync my accounts and switch between them. The software syncs nicely with your iPhone and automatically syncs your iCloud account to it. Unlike the old Apple TV, where typing in passwords or TV shows was a pain, the new one will open up your iPhone keyboard, which makes it much easier. I’m also surprised at how accurate Siri has become. A few years ago, Siri wasn’t worth the hassle, but now it’s gotten so good at voice recognition that I actually trust it and use it all the time. I also love the “Up Next” feature in the Apple TV+ app that acts as a consolidated watch list for all my movie and TV show apps. Lastly, I appreciate Apple’s strong stance on privacy. I choose to allow them to collect my metadata for how I interact with the app, and in the Settings app, I noticed that, if I want to, I can actually examine the exact metadata packages that they send to their servers. As a programmer, I know how to read these text packages, and I scanned over them and found nothing nefarious. I was impressed that the ability to do that is actually available in the settings.