20 of those 23 minutes were spent trying to...

20 of those 23 minutes were spent trying to blindly talk him through the process of disabling the closed captioning system on his Samsung TV, something that would’ve taken me - quite literally - about 15 seconds.

“OK. What do you see now? … OK… push the Menu button… now push the left arrow once… now what do you see? OK, now push the down arrow until you… what happened? You don’t see anything now? You’re changing channels? Wrong down arrow.”

Etc., for 20 minutes. While I patiently waited for him to stop making the same mistakes, I found myself wishing I could just pull out my iPad, open Safari, type in an IP address, and be remotely controlling the TV and adjusting its settings from the comfort of my couch.

More than anything, I want the rumors of an “Apple TV” to be true if only for the fact that it might contain a menu system and remote control that are useable by people of all technical skill levels, or remotely configurable by people with advanced skill levels.

Help us, Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and Jony Ive… you’re our only hope.