The AppleTV
January 10, 2007
Having had time to watch the keynote properly today I’m starting a short series of articles covering what was announced and what wasn’t, combined with some of my own thoughts.
First up… the AppleTV
The AppleTV is an attempt to bring all of your iTunes content and allow you to watch it all through your TV using a simple, easy to use FrontRow interface. It’s not ground breaking by any means, hell, this has been going on for a few years, all you need is a PC and some media centre software.
This, however, is Apples take on it, so naturally it’s easy to use and oozes elegance. Here are some tech specs:
- 40Gb hard drive (50 hours video or 9000 songs)
- 802.11 b+g+n support
- Auto-sync from one computer
- Stream from up to 5 computers
- Up to 720p HD video
Now, I download a lot of digital video and though the chair in this room is comfy, and my 17’ iMac display isn’t bad, it doesn’t beat watching my “big flat widescreen TV¹” from the comfort of my sofa. So for me, this sort of product is nearly perfect but it has one major flaw and a more minor one that’s holding me back from jumping on the bandwagon right away (besides my lack of cash).
Firstly the minor flaw is storage. The device holds a mere 40Gb of data so if you’re storing any HD material on it you’re going to fill this up pretty quickly. The worst part about this is that there’s a solution already built into the box that would fix this but it hasn’t been used. USB2. On the back there’s a USB2 port, but it says on the product page that it’s for diagnostic use only. Why could Apple not have let us plug in our own USB2 hard drive there? Then you could have near unlimited storage as well as being able to swap in and out different HD’s if needed instead of repeatedly syncing or streaming.
The major flaw is codecs. It’s great that the AppleTV supports h264 all the way up to 720p, yes the quality is excellent. But what about WMV or DivX?
Admittedly WMV is a format used by a competing product (Windows Media Player) but surely having interoperability with a larger number of video formats makes this a more attractive product?
While h264 is great I certainly don’t want to spend a week converting my existing digital collection from one codec to another just to get it to work. My hope is that there will be some way to get additional codecs onto the device, either officially or unofficially, otherwise it’s unlikely I’ll bother with one.
Now, if I were someone who downloads movies, TV and music from the iTunes store then naturally this fits in perfectly, and is in fact the consumer that Apple are clearly targeting with this. My Mum is a huge fan of the iTunes store and a device like this that’s easy to use would be perfect for her.
Finally, with regard to overall functionality, it’s clear that other media devices competing in this space are doing this sort of thing already and they’re far more mature and feature rich compared to the AppleTV. But there’s something undeniably elegant and attractive about Apples take on bringing media from the PC to the living room which may just sway consumers in Apples direction.
They’re retailing for £199 (which doesn’t seem that bad to me) and they’re shipping in February. I’ll certainly be interested to see reviews of this once consumers have them in their hands next month.
In my next entry I’ll take a look at the long awaited iPhone which seems to be following me everywhere I go the past 24 hours!
¹My TV may be wide, but it’s by no means flat
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