Not as easy as it should be

We got a new Apple TV 4K yesterday because I needed a current HomeKit Hub to replace the old iPad mini I had been using, and because the old Apple TV was losing capability with every update.

The physical installation of the new box was trivial – unplug three wires from the old box and connect them to the new one. Then the fun began.

The old Apple TV came with a couple of dozen streaming apps – you could hide the ones you didn’t want, but you couldn’t add any that weren’t already there. The new Apple TV runs tvOS and lets makes you use its very own App Store to choose and install whatever apps you want – that took a while, since I had to log into each service and authorize the Apple TV.

After that, it was time to deal with HomeKit. When I’d originally set up the house in HomeKit, I’d used the “house account” I’d created for iTunes; I’m trying to get rid of that account, so I wanted to reassign the house to my own account. You can’t do it – you have to delete the house from HomeKit and re-create it under the new account.

That wasn’t too difficult, but then I had to manually add all of my devices again, and there are a lot of them (29 in the alarm system alone, though some of them seem to be an artifact of the system’s imagination). Another hour or so took care of that.

And that was my day. Well, that, Torah Study, cooking, and taking walks with Diane – so it was a pretty good day!