The Apple TV (2010) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 4, 2010 12:07 AM ESTFinal Words
At $99 the Apple TV is at least priced competitively. You can get cheaper streaming boxes, but not by a huge margin. Other than 802.11n support, the Roku HD appears to give you Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand for $60. The $40 you’d save could pay for a few months of Netflix or several video rentals.
What the Apple TV does well is integrate into the iTunes world. The segregation between the Apple TV and iTunes rental stores is borderline unacceptable but the rest works well. Music you’ve got on in iTunes can easily stream to your TV. You can show slideshows of your photos while you play the music (again working best with iPhoto, and a little more painful if you’ve got photos scattered around your drives). Flipping through photos is just awesome if you use an iOS device like the iPhone. Just flick on the iPhone and you move through photos on the Apple TV. Both movie and TV rentals work well, the interface is clean and the iTunes account integration makes things easy. If you already purchase a lot of your content through iTunes, the Apple TV feels like home.
The problem I have with the Apple TV is it feels like a product with a lot of wasted potential. You can make arguments for OS X, the iPhone and even the iPad, but with the Apple TV despite its lower pricing it’s just not complete enough. You can watch some TV shows but not others, so you have to keep cable. And those that you can watch don’t stream live, you get them 24 hours later - so you might as well use Hulu or wait for the Boxee Box. I get that this aspect isn’t Apple’s fault, but the others are.
There’s no way to stream your OS X desktop to the Apple TV. That alone would be a killer feature, the Apple version of Intel’s WiDi. There is no present day support for apps on the Apple TV. Although I believe enabling 3rd party development for the Apple TV would require Apple taking the platform a lot more seriously than it has.
With Google TV and the Boxee Box shipping later this year you’re better off waiting if you want a good way to bridge Internet content with your TV. Even then I’m not expecting either one of those options to be perfect (although they should be a lot closer than anything we’ve seen). Personally I’m sold on Netflix, but I need a companion service for newer content. Cable TV is the old answer, but it’s horribly inefficient from a cost and convenience standpoint. There’s simply no way to do away with cable TV and use a simple, IP based, autonomous box for all of your content without resorting to piracy of some sort. The day that changes is the day the Apple TV will stop being a hobby.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Thanks for the correction, fixed :)cjs150 - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
And it will look like the Apple TV.What a simple concept, small box, very limited backplate. Lets think about it how about a box that had the following connectors
1. Ethernet connection (but a bit faster)
2. HDMI connection
3. Audio out (personally would not bother and take through HDMI)
4. USB
5. Wifi (optional for me because house if wired)
Add in 2 Gb of memory a small SSD for OS + limited applications
Plays movies, TV, music. Can surf web and basically that is it.
Would need some sort of wireless connection to allow remote control and to attach a keyboard (if only to type web addresses).
Apple have got the size of the box about right. Even a mini-itx board has too many features that would not be needed for the ideal straming box.
Apple has given me a glimpse of the future - it looks like Apple TV but it will be something else
tipoo - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Is that a typo, or can it really go that high? Apple's official specs list MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps and Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps.Docchris - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
he was specifically testing non-apple videos to ty and break it, so what apples specs state doesn't really matter.i was just curious where he got a video form which exceeds the blu-ray specification
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showthread.php?t...I remuxed the files as .mov without re-encoding and sent them over to the Apple TV. Even if I re-encoded down to 10Mbps there was still some slight stuttering so there's something unusually stressful about these samples. At 70Mbps or above the Apple TV would start behaving very strange, the video player app would either crash or the unit would reboot before finishing playback.
Take care,
Anand
tech6 - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
While the cable and content oligopoly are terrified of IP based home entertainment, no legitimate solution will truly replace cable. Cable is simply too good of a revenue stream not to protect by these companies. Once they have "cabel-ized" the Internet through the defeat of net neutrality and can restrict and monitor users Internet activities then I'm sure we will see a lot more IP TV but at the expense of any freedom or anonymity that we may have ever had on the Internet.mfenn - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Perfect response! XDvol7ron - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
"You can argue that it’s for firmware updates but there’s also WiFi/Ethernet for that."Isn't WiFi firmware update for anything considered bad practice? Or have people turned the other cheek on this?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Technically as long as the firmware package can download over WiFi and execute once completely downloaded it should be ok. I agree USB seems like the safer bet though, particularly if there's a firmware update that fixes a network issue.Take care,
Anand
naho - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
"Unlike a smartphone it eats a good amount of power at idle - a whole 1.8W. I don’t think Apple even bothered to enable serious power management on the A4 in the Apple TV, it’s just not necessary."What would power management reducing idle power to 0.8 W have saved customers?
Eg. if 5 million units are sold of this model x 22 hours idle per day x average product lifetime 4 years x 365 days/year x 0.12$/kWh (maybe less in US, more Europe) = 160.6 GWh x 0.12$/kWh = 19.27 million dollars in additional electricity bills.