AppleTV Take 2 – where are you?!
By john on Feb 6, 2008 in Apple, featured
I am one of the few who, last year, went out and bought an AppleTV. I’d experimented with several media center PC’s over the years, but honestly didn’t really want a bulky PC sitting there beside my entertainment center. It also didn’t really work all that great. I’m sure if I had put more effort into things I could have succeeded with that project, but I didn’t and I didn’t. Regardless, though, I still wanted the ability to do the things a media center could do, and AppleTV made it fairly easy to do. Music could be streamed seamlessly from inside it’s interface, movies and TV shows could be organized and watched as well. In short it did a lot of what I wanted it to do, even with it’s limitations.
I was incredibly excited when I heard about the new functionality (movie rentals and tv show downloads right from the AppleTV interface, as well as smaller things that I also think are neat – Flickr and .mac image support. Initially I was expecting this to be a new version of the hardware as well, so I was a bit bummed out and thought “great, I’ve got something cool but there’s a cooler version coming out now, I should have waited”, only to be hit with the fact that it’s a free software upgrade. Nice! But….
… Last week, the week we were told it would be released, we hear that it’s not quite ready yet and will be out “in a week or two.” Well, that was a week ago and still we’ve not seen the update. Sure they said “or two”, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be impatiently waiting!
I like the direction Apple is taking with this product, and am especially glad that they didn’t just count it as a flop and let it die. It’s not for everybody, sure, but for me it’s all I need.
If only they’d release the update…
Popularity: 11% [?]
Yeah. The new rental service looks awesome.
My problems with the AppleTV still exist though: – No playing from Windows Fileshares
- Requires connection to iTunes
Until they fix those, I doubt I will buy one. And somehow, I doubt they will fix them.
It is very neat though. If I didnt have a terabyte of downloaded movies I might consider buying one.
Brian | Feb 12, 2008 | Reply
I doubt they will address those issues as well, but for me its the perfect device. The update was released today – I will be posting about it later on. So far though it does indeed seem to work and feel better.
It would be nice to see it support more file types though.
john | Feb 12, 2008 | Reply