How to use a Bluetooth keyboard with the Apple TV
Apple refers to the Apple TV as a “hobby,” and though the home-entertainment device has received regular updates, especially over the past couple years, for most of its life that description has fit. Still, the updates have helped make today’s Apple TV a much more capable device than the one that debuted back in 2007. It has improved enough that we regularly use it in our home.
The current Apple remote.
But its remote still stinks.
That remote is essentially the same accessory that shipped with the original Apple TV, except that it looks nicer now. The current iteration has seven buttons—Left, Right, Up, Down, Select, Menu, and Play/Pause—and you navigate the Apple TV’s interface by moving your selection, one line or icon step at a time, using the directional buttons. To choose an option or to delve down into the next menu, you press Select (the center button); to go up a level, you press Menu.
The process works, but it’s clunky, especially when you want to move, say, five items down in a list: The Apple TV interface doesn’t respond quickly enough to five fast Down presses, and if instead you hold the Down button, the selection will move slowly at first, and then accelerate, often skipping right past where you wanted to go.
And that’s the user-friendly part. When you have to enter text—for example, when you’re typing a username or password, or entering the name of a movie you want to search for—you face the dreaded scroll-scroll-scroll-enter-scroll-scroll-enter-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-enter process. For a long time, the experience of using the Apple TV’s remote was frustrating enough to make me reach for my beloved TiVo remote and watch TV instead.
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