Function101 is selling an Apple TV remote that (hopefully) doesn't suck

Function101 Apple Tv Remote (Image credit: Function101)

What you need to know

The Apple TV Siri Remote is bad.
No, it's awful.
This $30 remote is a better bet for all kinds of reasons.

Sick of the abomination that is the Apple TV Siri Remote? We all are and Function101 is hoping we'll all pay $30 to get rid of it. But the joke's on them – we'd pay twice as much!

Steve Jobs once said of iTunes on the PC that "it's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell". I can think of another example of that – a replacement for the Apple TV's Siri Remote. Sure, you might not want to chisel your fingertips off every time you pick it up. But you'll still have to deal with that interface.

But I digress and for now, I'll take this remote. And it looks pretty cool, too. The "Button Remote for Apple TV" honestly reminds me of the remote that comes with your average Amazon Fire TV Stick. It looks fine, and it has most of the buttons that you're going to need to banish the Siri Remote from your sofa – there's no Siri button, unfortunately. It's boring, but we've had an interesting remote for the last five years and look how that worked out.

You can order this vanilla remote now for $29.95 and sure, it's boring. But sometimes boring is good, right?

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.