We had a lot of opinions when tvOS first came out several months ago, but decided that we would wait until the first update to post anything, hoping that issues we saw in dot zero would be resolved in dot one.

Our first impressions of the OS are fairly positive. This is a definite welcome sight.

Our likes:

• The interface is much more polished.

• Siri now works with movies and series that have placed in iTunes from your own ripped DVD or Blu-Ray.

• The addition of the list of director / actors in a movie and then cross-referencing that to other movies is a nice addition. There is also a list of similar movies or TV shows to the one you have selected.

Our dislikes:

• For a company that brought the user interface to the world, some engineer in Cupertino was asleep for that history lesson. The specific up / down / left / right movements needed to go from ‘Movies’ to ‘TV’ and then to the list of shows makes us feel that appleTV should suddenly gain superpowers.

  Right —> Down —> Left —> Down till you get to the list you want. Who thinks this is easy for consumers? Who sat in the meetings and said “Yeah, Right Down Left Down, that’s a great way for people to get from their library to all of their TV shows.” Seriously.

• The OS still won’t start playing the next TV show in the series when the previous is completed. We still have to go back to the interface and either wait the minute or more for the system to realize ‘Oh, you’re done with that episode’, or go to the list of episodes and select the next one.

• There is a complete lack of user-feedback on what TV shows or movies have not been watched. We assume that in Apple’s mind its more important that the interface looks good rather than provide the user with useful information.

  Let’s say you a TV show with multiple series (seasons) unwatched. When you choose that show from the list instead of going to the first season with an unwatched episode, the OS throws you to the first episode of the latest series. That makes total sense doesn’t it. You haven’t watched the very first episode of the first series, but the appleTV takes you to Episode 1 of Series 5. Who could possibly expect it to operate any differently.

  For movies, if you bring up the list of movies there is no visual difference between one’s you’ve watched and one’s you haven’t. We guess Apple assumes that we are able to remember what of the 800 movies within our iTunes Library we’ve actually watched.

• Under tvOS 11, our appleTV4 required rebooting after just a few hours of viewing. The interface was still navigable but it would refuse to actually play anything. A reboot would resolve the issue. We haven’t seen the problem since upgrading to 11.1. Hopefully this is resolved.

We'll post more of our impressions over the coming weeks.