Brief words on a new apple TV box and apple’s October

John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote this week about Apple’s reportedly extremely busy October. Of everything the company is expected to announce, Gruber’s quip on the Apple TV 4K, untouched since 2022, caught my eye the most.

“I really want to see Apple double-down in this space [and] reinvigorate it,” he said on Tuesday. “I think watching TV on Apple TV hardware is by far the best experience out there. Yet its market share is very low. Apple TV is to the living room today what the Mac was to desktop computing in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Everyone sees it as too expensive and they have no idea why they’d actually be happier if they had one.”

I wholeheartedly agree with my friend here. I love my Apple TV and believe it’s the best, most accessible set-top box on the market, and I’ve tried some of the competition over the years. Without rehashing my talking points from articles past, suffice it to say I remain steadfast in my belief that tvOS has the user interface backwards; all the information found in the TV app should be part of the main screen, not siloed within a discrete app. In this way, the tvOS Home Screen could be more akin to Google TV with personalized recommendations, etc, but nicer with the usual tvOS polish.

As of this writing, Apple is purportedly planning to launch a new Apple TV 4K, along with a new HomePod mini and a long-rumored smart display, on October 13. My new building is scheduled to undergo some needed electrical upgrades that week, so I’ll be keeping abreast of all these Apple announcements from a hotel room here in downtown Portland.