We hate to continue bashing on the AppleTV, but if Apple is going to ignore it, not take it seriously and put out shite, we’re going to mention it.

On several iTunes videos, we’ve set the start point within iTunes to skip the intro. iTunes supports this under ‘Options’ for a given video. However, this is completely ignored by the AppleTV 4.

With the AppleTV 4, if a start point is set, you have to hit ‘play’ 4-5 times before it will finally start playing. It will first start to play the kick back to the interface, until about on the 4th or 5th time, it will finally ask if you want to resume play (from the point you set) or start from the beginning.

The interface within the AppleTV 4 is complete bollocks. Prior to the current AppleTV hitting the down button brought up an easy to use interface for chapter markers, the up bottom brought up the information about the video being played. Now Apple in their ‘wisdom’ has combined those into the down button.

By doing that, while ‘prettier’, they have made it more difficult to use. Take chapter markers for example. In the AppleTV 2 & 3 to jump forward or back chapters, all it took was 1) down button 2) left or right button to go forward or back. With the AppleTV 4, the sequence is now 1) down button 2) down button again to get into the chapters 3) left or right to select chapter you want to jump to 4) select button. Not only does this take two extra steps but its harder to use and less intuitive.

To Ive, yeah, it’s pretty but sometimes functionality is more important than looks.

Come on guys, it doesn’t take a boffin to test this stuff and make sure it works.

To the board and Tim - How many bonuses have been given to Craig and Dan when they put shite like this out with minimal testing?