Of course, if you have a Mac, then you very likely have the luxury of Bluetooth as well, and I have blogged, or will be blogging, about various uses of Bluetooth.
There was an application called Front Row, which used the remote to control films and music, but I don’t believe this has been in use since OS 10.7.Īll of this is a shame, as the ability to control your computer wirelessly can often come in handy, and several companies produce excellent software which greatly expands the ability of the Apple remote to control pretty well any application in any way you want. The one area where the control seems to have remained popular is with the Apple TV/Home Theatre users. It’s difficult to keep track of what does what, however, as newer models of computer seem to be dropping this feature and users are being encouraged to use an iPhone app which does a similar job but if it has one of these on the front: Note that the ‘Play’ button has been moved from inside the ‘+’, ‘-‘, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ buttons, and placed separately, to the right of the ‘Menu’ button.Īt the time of writing, the Mac Pro and Mac Mini seem to have built-in IR capability. It remained as an option on the Macbook Pro, but the remote itself wasn’t being bundled with the laptop. A slightly larger silver aluminium version of the remote came out in 2009, but also in that year Macbooks stopped being made with IR capability. The IR system began with the iMac G5 and quickly spread to the white Macbook, Macbook Pro and Mac Mini. I’ll be returning to that point in Part 2. It’s not clear from the picture, but if you haven’t seen one, it’s quite tiny – about 8cm by 3cm. In fact, I don’t believe the Apple IR system is well known at all amongst Mac users, and I hope this study will show that it can be more useful to music makers than was previously thought.įrom about 2005, Apple began adding an infra-red remote capability to their machines, which came with an attractive little remote control like this:
There is an article here which describes the remote being used on a Windows PC, and here on a Mac running Windows, but I imagine these are not common usages for this system. This article, by and large, is for Mac owners, as it describes the Apple infra-red (IR) remote control system that’s been used on and off in Apple machines for about 7 or 8 years.
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