Apple touts the Mac mini as being compatible with any USB keyboard, but there’s a catch: If your keyboard was designed for use with a Windows computer, it doesn’t have the Mac’s familiar. USB port lacks power If you have the device plugged into a USB hub or into your keyboard, plug it directly into one of the USB ports on the computer. If it works there, the issue is with the device to which it had been previously connected.

Apple refers to the as a “hobby,” and though the home-entertainment device has received regular updates, especially over the past couple years, for most of its life that description has fit. Still, the updates have helped make today’s Apple TV a much more capable device than the one that debuted back in 2007. It has improved enough that we regularly use it in our home. The current Apple remote. But its remote still stinks. That remote is essentially the same accessory that shipped with the original Apple TV, except that it looks nicer now. The current iteration has seven buttons—Left, Right, Up, Down, Select, Menu, and Play/Pause—and you navigate the Apple TV’s interface by moving your selection, one line or icon step at a time, using the directional buttons.

To choose an option or to delve down into the next menu, you press Select (the center button); to go up a level, you press Menu. The process works, but it’s clunky, especially when you want to move, say, five items down in a list: The Apple TV interface doesn’t respond quickly enough to five fast Down presses, and if instead you hold the Down button, the selection will move slowly at first, and then accelerate, often skipping right past where you wanted to go. And that’s the user-friendly part.

When you have to enter text—for example, when you’re typing a username or password, or entering the name of a movie you want to search for—you face the dreaded scroll-scroll-scroll-enter-scroll-scroll-enter-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-enter process. For a long time, the experience of using the Apple TV’s remote was frustrating enough to make me reach for my beloved TiVo remote and watch TV instead. The $649 remote That changed back in 2008 with the release of Apple’s, which let you use an iTunes-like interface on your iPhone to control your Apple TV and—hallelujah!—use your iOS device’s onscreen keyboard to enter text. Later updates to the Remote app added iPad support and a nice touchscreen-remote mode for navigating the Apple TV’s own menus.

Excel 2014 for mac. The frequency with which my family used the Apple TV increased dramatically. Apple's Remote app for iOS.

That said, the Remote app has some drawbacks, too. It obviously requires that you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch handy; and each time you launch the app, there’s a delay before it finds and reconnects to your Apple TV on your local network. Also, if you happen to be using your iOS device while watching something on the Apple TV, you end up switching back and forth between Remote and your other apps, and when you do so, there’s a noticeable delay before the Remote app is responsive each time.

What I’ve long wanted instead was to be able to use a standard Bluetooth keyboard as a remote control and text-entry tool. It turns out that the, released earlier this year, enabled just that feature, letting you pair a Bluetooth keyboard with a second-generation or later Apple TV and then use that keyboard for both controlling the Apple TV and entering text. Configuring and subsequently using this duo are simple operations. Input options Before getting into those details, a quick note about keyboard compatibility: Apple’s states that only recent Apple (where “recent” means “all but the original 2003 model”) are officially supported. However, the company also points out that “third-party Bluetooth keyboards that use the Apple keyboard layout may also be compatible.” Credit: Apple Apple's Wireless Keyboard.

Over the past few months, I’ve tested over a dozen third-party Bluetooth keyboards with the second- and third-generation Apple TV, and every one of them has worked perfectly. The models I’ve tried include Logitech’s multi-device and, which are ideal if you want to move your keyboard between your Apple TV, your Mac, and an iOS device. I’ve also tested several, and a compact keyboard designed for use with a media-center computer. If you don’t already have a Bluetooth keyboard on hand, consider getting Amazon’s, which works well and costs just $30. Pairing the Apple The process of pairing the keyboard with your Apple TV is similar to what you’d do to pair a Bluetooth accessory with your Mac or iPad.