According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the on-going bane of Apple‘s secrecy policies, Apple is not only planning to redesign iOS, iPadOS and macOS to more closely resemble the ‘spatial computing’ platform of the Apple Vision Pro – it’s also planning to bring this new look to tvOS 19, the software that runs on the Apple TV 4K.
We don’t know exactly what this will look like, but I actually love this idea – at least, in the version that I’m imagining. There are two things I’d expect that I think would be big improvements; one practical, and one aesthetic.
There is also, however, one huge potential pitfall – one that I broadly trust Apple to avoid, but that I still wouldn’t bet money against.
First, the practical improvement. I think it’s faintly ridiculous that tvOS still doesn’t support picture-in-picture, so you can keep an eye on two sports games at the same time from different apps, or keep your eye on a Twitch marathon or live rolling news event while watching something else.
The floating windows of Vision Pro are an obvious fit for this in terms of design affordances and could give a really cool 3D look to that kind of layout. In software terms, an ‘affordance’ is something that lets you know what a piece of software design is supposed to do. So, for example, the faintly 3D look of a phone’s keyboard indicates that these are buttons you can press.
Perhaps we’ll not only get picture-in-picture, but also floating small versions of apps in the same way you get on iPadOS, so you can see sports stats while watching something else.
The aesthetic idea I’m imagining is a home screen that has a 3D layering element, similar to that of visionOS. The app icons float at the front, with an image behind them – and hopefully something more interesting than a plain background.
I’d love to have the more gentle options from Apple’s screensavers moving in the background here – a slow track through a forest, waves and fish gently washing past the screen – while the app icons shine in front.
You could choose your own videos to play in the background, too – but maybe something smart could be done with still images as well. Photos you take on your iPhone have depth data stored, so I wonder if Apple could do something subtle with the image’s 3D elements, so they shift slightly at times to make the image look like a diorama within your TV.
Apple does this a little with thumbnails in the Apple TV movie and TV store, where some ‘posters’ for movies have a subtle 3D effect when you hover over them.
However, this idea of background video is also the part that could become more annoying than delightful. You know how basically all the best TVs and best streaming devices have prominent ads for shows you have no interest in from streaming services? And how the best streaming services often have a nasty habit of auto-playing trailers when you’re just browsing?
The worst version of this idea would have the trailer for Prime Video’s latest mediocre spy thriller autoplaying full screen behind the apps while you’re browsing. And in theory, this would then stop when you move to highlight another app instead, but if that other app also starts playing a trailer, that’s not going to be any better. Your eyes will start melting in minutes if the background bounces from trailer-start to trailer-start while you’re scrolling over to fire up Netflix.
I don’t think Apple will go this route – it hasn’t so far, and a big part of the Apple TV 4K‘s popularity with the home theater enthusiast community at large outside of Apple fans is because people are happy to pay more for an ad-free home screen.
However, with the threat of increased tariffs on Apple products in the US, Apple may find itself wanting to make more money elsewhere to cover any costs it has to eat. So while I don’t think it’s likely that Apple will allow intrusive trailers on the tvOS home screen, I’m not ruling it out.
But in general, I like the idea of a little more depth to my TV screen – and I already really love the nature screensavers on Apple TV, so I’d really love to have them appear even more often, as a window to another place around the world every time I turn my TV on.
We’ll likely find out more at WWDC 2025, which is coming in early June.
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