Why Is Setting Up an Apple TV So Painful?

Apr 14, 2024

#apple 

We’re an Apple household, phones, watches, laptops, iPads, TVs, everything.

My in-laws are not.

They’ve been suffering with a terrible Amazon Fire Stick for a while, Amazon is obsessed with chewing more and more of the screen real estate with their view on how people want to browse TV shows, almost to the point of being outright hostile. With their ever-increasing age, their small 32" TV, the 10-foot UI has disappeared for Amazon and it has become nearly unreadable for them.

For all their problems, the Apple TV is a good user experience in comparison, a simple overview for application and generally a decent UX for people who just want to watch TV. Our existing Apple TV is getting a little long in the tooth, and while it is still supported and fast enough for us we decided to upgrade ours to the ’latest gen’ (newer processor only) and hand down our old one to the in-laws. As a happy coincidence, we had a stack of gift cards from our previous trade-ins at Apple and were able to pick up the new Apple TV 4K Gen 3 for £53.

As I said, they’re not Apple ecosystem users, so when I reset the existing Apple TV I attempted to configure it up for a new Apple ID, and oh boy what problems I had. I don’t really have the energy to explain every step so here it is in bullet point form.

Creating an Apple ID

• Attempting to sign-up from a browser failed with a generic error message, suggestions on the ‘Apple Community Forums’ consist of:
  • Use an email address on a ‘proper mail provider’ (gmail.com, outlook.com, etc.)
  • Password wasn’t complicated enough
  • Password was too complicated
  • Your email address is too generic
  • Your email address is too complicated
  • Your email address can’t contain your name.
• As it turns out, you can’t register an Apple ID on an IPv6 connection, disabling IPv6 worked without any further changes as above.
  • IPv6 is now rolled out a lot in the UK…
  • No, my IPv6 subnet is not on any blacklists.
• Email verification doesn’t work reliably, it took 3-4 attempts at re-sending for the link to not be invalid (IPv6 again?).

Using the Apple ID

• Logging into the Apple TV worked with the newly created ID.
• After attempting to access the App Store, you need to create an ‘iTunes Account’
  • Attempting to login from a browser to iTunes is impossible.
  • On a Windows machine, I installed iTunes and attempted to login - I need to create it on an iPhone or a Mac only!?
  • I had to create a second account on my Macbook just to create my ‘iTunes Account’
  • As it turns out, all it wanted was to accept some terms and conditions!

Joining a family account

• The email link for the invite doesn’t work on anything other than a Mac or iPhone.
• You can’t join a family account without a Mac or iPhone.
• Sometimes it’ll just spin for a while before then complaining it was unsuccessful, and the invite disappeared from view.
• You couldn’t invite them again, even though they disappeared from the view.

Sharing Photos

• You need to create an ‘iCloud Account’, see where this going?
• You need a Mac or iPhone to create an iCloud account.
• At least this one was the least painful and just worked on the Mac.
• Again, attempting to use iCloud on Windows just threw an error saying you need to create the account on a Mac or iPhone.

After a few hours of banging my head against the wall, I finally got there. How do Apple expect anyone to onboard with an Apple TV only? Did I do something stupidly wrong? By attempting to create the account first, did I break their onboarding flow?