Which One Is Your Favorite?New Apple TV Or Old Apple TV

    The new Apple TV is faster and snappier, has an App Store, and has Siri so you can search and navigate using only your voice, if that's your thing. It even has a touch-sensitive trackpad on the remote (touch gestures make everything better, right?). It can even do gaming!
    Unfortunately, these features sound way better on paper than they are in practice. Let me go through each of them one by one, based on my experience:

     The new Apple TV is indeed faster and snappier. This is probably the only thing I really like about it.
     The App Store is fine, but like the iOS App Store, it feels outdated. It's relatively intuitive, but I rarely go looking for new apps and games — I think that's because people don't use TVs the way they use phones or tablets. Unless there are new apps that happen to have programming I wouldn't have been able to watch otherwise, which is never the case, I don't really have a reason to visit the App Store.
     Games on the Apple TV are basic at best, and not a great experience. These feel mostly like phone games ported to the TV, nothing near console quality (like 40+ million other people, I own a PlayStation 4 for gaming; many others own Xbox and Nintendo consoles, so the Apple TV isn't really fulfilling any kind of gaming need, unless you really want to play "Angry Birds" on the big screen. But I can't think of anyone who would want that.)
    Siri is fine, but not great. It's useful on occasion — you can ask for any movie or TV show, regardless of what you're looking at, and get results from all the various apps you have downloaded. My favorite feature is the ability to ask, "What did s/he just say?" and have Siri automatically play back the last 15 seconds, but with added subtitles. That's clever. Everything else is par for the course. Siri takes a second or two to activate, then a second or two to hear you, and then it responds. Often times, it misunderstands me. It's far from natural-feeling, unlike the Amazon Echo in my home. 
    The fourth-generation Apple TV should be so much better than it is, which is inaccurate and generally unpleasant. It doesn't help that the set-top box itself is bigger than past models for no apparent reason (Siri can't take up that much space, can it?), and that the remote control is not intuitive, with excessive, non-intuitive controls. 
    Apple TV owners generally have a few things in common, without fail. They enjoy the Apple ecosystem, and they probably own one or more other Apple devices as well. Another thing they have in common, however, is that they have almost certainly lost the tiny little remote control that comes with the Apple TV at some point, and been forced to buy a new one from Apple.