2015 was a bold year for Apple. The company jumped into new product categories, polished its existing hardware and software lines, and wowed us repeatedly.
Apple also made most of us throw up in our mouths a little bit now and then, due to some questionable (and some undeniably bad) choices.
These are Apple’s biggest wins and most epic fails of the past year, as remembered — fondly and otherwise — by Cult of Mac staffers.
The new Apple TV may soon get some competition from Microsoft, which according to a new rumor is considering making slimmer, cheaper version of the Xbox One console in an effort to beat Apple in the living room.
The Apple TV’s App Store is still so new, odds are you might be having trouble figuring out which apps are the best.
The holidays are just around the corner, so for the sake of the friends and relatives who will soon be swarming your living room, you might want to populate your new set-top box with some must-haves. Take a look at Cult of Mac’s top picks for best Apple TV apps.
Now you can watch (and explore) 360-degree videos on the new Apple TV, thanks to virtual reality network Littlstar’s free app.
The network’s new tvOS app delivers content from the likes of Showtime, Disney and PBS. It works with Apple TV’s Siri Remote, granting users the ability to control the angle used in the immersive 360-degree videos via the remote’s nifty trackpad.
Amazon, Google and Roku are all battling to win over your TV, but according to the Disney CEO Bob Iger, the new Apple TV tops them all, not only because it’s great for consumers, but also because it’s a win for content creators.
“One of the most important things that the industry needs to do is demand a better user experience,” Bob Iger told Bloomberg in an interview this morning. “The Apple TV box and the interface that it provides is the best user experience I’ve seen ever for television users.”
Watch Bob gush about Apple’s new box below:
This week: the force is looking very strong with the new Star Wars movie; live football may be coming to the Apple TV; the tvOS app store hits a major milestone; why you shouldn’t expect 3D touch in the next iPad Air; and with 2016 on the horizon, we’ll review our favorite games, gadgets, and books of 2015. Hit play, you must!
Our thanks to FreshBooks for supporting this episode, the easy-to-use invoicing software designed to help small business owners get organized, save time invoicing and get paid faster. Get started with a free trial at Freshbooks.com/cultcast.
The NFL is looking for a new partner to host Thursday Night Football, and it appears that Apple may be gunning to make an interception from Yahoo and Google.
Traditional networks like CBS, ESPN, Fox, and NBC were all informed by the NFL that it is ready to accept bid for broadcasting rights to its Thursday Night Football package, but the league also notified Apple that it can bid for a non-exclusive streaming deal for Apple TV and iOS users.
Pac-Man is a touchstone of gamer nostalgia, and Hipster Whale (the dynamic duo behind runaway hit Crossy Road) has created one of the best spin-offs yet: Pac-Man 256.
Better yet, it looks like the free-to-play endless runner cum dot muncher is now available on your high-def living room screen via the Apple TV itself.
Androgynous English rockers Placebo just claimed the honor of landing the first “artist” app on the new Apple TV. The free Placebo app is designed to deliver an “immersive” experience for fans while they remain ensconced on their couches.
Ultimately the app, which was released Monday, lets you watch music videos, live video of the band and “exclusive content” from the Placebo archives, all in your very own home.
BBC’s iPlayer app has landed on Apple TV in the U.K., joining the other streaming set top boxes — such as Roku, Google Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV — for which it was already available.
The app includes a full catalog of programs from the past month, along with live-streaming of BBC TV stations, the ability to start watching a program on your iPhone or iPad and then switch to Apple TV or vice versa, and personalized recommendations.
On the Apple TV app store, entertainment apps, including streaming video from the likes of HBONow and Netflix, are a clear winner, followed next by games.
AppFigures, an app tracking service for publishers and developers, took a look at the trends from Apple TV’s first month out of the gate. Their report also has some interesting insights about each category, and the way the Apple TV’s digital storefront is shaping up to be a fairly viable place to sell apps.
The remote for the new Apple TV can be a bit tricky to master and very easy to break, but help is on the according to Apple media boss Eddy Cue who revealed this morning that an iOS remote app for the new black box is coming soon.
Apple has reportedly suspended plans to add an Internet-based live television service for Apple TV, maintaining its focus on providing media from other companies.
A person familiar with negotiations claims that Apple’s plan to sell a $30-$40 monthly package of exclusive television stations has run into problems — based on the amount of money content creators are asking for for programming.
Apple is pushing its new iteration of Apple TV hard, hoping to move it beyond a “hobby” into a must-have set top box for every living room and television set possible.
Apple’s new ad, “The Future of Television,” is a visual collage of just about everything you can do with the Apple TV, including watching television shows and movies, playing games, and listening to music.
Check it out.
Here’s an amazing factoid: Netflix almost went head-to-head with the Apple TV in 2007, until they realized they were about to pick a fight they would surely lose.
The new, fourth generation Apple TV is still settling into its home next to our television sets, but already Apple is hard at work on its successor, according to a new report.
Apple’s suppliers are said to be putting a limited number of the new Apple TV into limited, small-scale “trial” production, ahead of volume production beginning early in 2016.
Once Apple brought games to the Apple TV, it was a no-brainer that we’d all want to play them together on the couch in our living room.
Apple requires developers to support the new Siri Remote, but they can also allow third-party game controllers to move stuff around on the screen, too.
Crossy Road, the excellent Frogger-like hit iOS game with the seemingly endless supply of cute creatures to play as (that was also an Apple TV launch title), goes one step further. If you want to play with a buddy and don’t have a second gamepad, you can have your pal play Crossy Road on Apple TV with just their iPhone.
Here’s how.
If you’re hoping to stream games from Steam to your new Apple TV, developer Kevin Smith (no, not the Clerks guy) has shown it is possible by modifying the Moonlight iOS project — which lets users stream Steam games from a desktop computer to their iOS device — so that it works with tvOS.
Check out the videos below.
Logging into any service on Apple TV is a pain. The text-entry field is one long line, and if you’ve got a particularly lengthy username or password for apps on the Apple TV, entering them can take much longer than it should.
Twitter-owned Digits is offering its own take on a solution with an SDK that tvOS developers can implement in their apps and let users type in a short string of numbers and letters that they get from their iPhone, rather than the full-on username and password combination.
This could solve the problem altogether, and it’s not much more tricky than using an app for Two-Step Authentication, which we all do now, anyway (or should).
Amazon’s Instant Video service has one of the best libraries in the world, but if you’re an Apple user, it has a crucial weakness: the only way to get it on Apple TV is to AirPlay it from an iOS or OS X device.
AirPlaying can be unreliable at times and you can’t use certain apps without cutting off your Amazon stream. That could change in just a few weeks though, according to an Amazon employee who let it slip that the company is working on an app for the new Apple TV.
You might be sick of the sight of Turkey by now, but you can’t spend enough time being thankful. The big question we have is: Should we be thankful to Apple for the lineup it has delivered in 2015, or was this a year to forget?
Apple certainly hasn’t been slow this year; we’ve had the Apple Watch, Apple Music, iPhone 6s with new technologies like 3D Touch, the new Apple TV, and the giant iPad Pro. But will any of these things stand out as smash-hits in a decade?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we battle it out over these questions and more!
If any more proof was needed that Apple TV is no longer being considered a “hobby,” check out the massive new billboard ad campaign that has been rolling out for the new fourth-generation Apple TV refresh.
Cleverly playing on a color bars motif which references both the old school Apple logo (with colors fastidiously picked out by Steve Jobs, to boot!) and a television test pattern, the billboards can be seen in both landscape and portrait orientation around the U.S.
The new Apple TV’s Siri Remote is great, except for all of those times that it isn’t.
We’ve run afoul of the remote’s touchpad a few times; it’s fine for navigating (and less fine for entering passwords), but sometimes it does its job too well. For example, we can’t even count the number of times we’ve been watching a movie and accidentally nudged the pad, sending our show scrubbing all willy-nilly into the past or future.
It’s pretty annoying, but luckily, Apple thought so, too, so it gave us a couple ways to fix that mistake when it happens. The company could have just disabled the touchpad while things were playing, but we’re not engineers.
These two fixes are the next best options.
Apple TV owners can watch ABC on their streaming boxes (with a subscription), and the company isn’t afraid to exploit the undying, platonic love between a bear and a frog to make that fact known.
The latest Apple TV ad showcases the Watch ABC app, which lets existing cable subscribers watch full episodes and live broadcasts of the network’s programming, including The Muppets. The puppet-driven show features prominently in the new, 15-second spot which went live today.
Check it out below:
The first major update for the new Apple TV just took one step closer to its public release with the third beta build of tvOS 9.1.