Apple TV – As Good As It Sounds?
I have been fortunate enough to pick up an Apple TV this past weekend, and like a good nerd, spent a vast amount of time tinkering with it. There has been some interest and breathless anticipation waiting for this latest Apple gizmo to pop out of the Cupertino womb. Is it the “next big thing”? Quite possibly yes.
First off, it’s incredibly simple. The worst part of set up was the time it took to drive home from the Apple store and set it up. To take advantage of this thing, you need a HD Television. Mine is hooked to a Samsung DLP – an older model that is native 720p. There are 3 things in the Apple TV box. The Apple TV unit (this thing is TINY), a very small remote and a power cable. Note – the cables to hook it to your TV are not in the box, so make sure you have them.
You can connect to your TV using either a single high density cable (called HDMI) or using 5 cables to carry the various signals. As my TV is older, I needed to use the 5 cable method. This went quickly and smoothly, and soon enough I had the Apple TV booted. There are few simple steps to set it up, and you are in business! Note however if you use the composite cables (the 5 wire method) that the unit will default to a lower resolution at first, and your picture will look fuzzy and kind of lame. Using setup from the menu can put you in the right resolution. Once set the quality of the picture was wonderful. Text and graphics for the Apple TV Interface were crisp and sharp. The unit is a model of simplicity to operate. Plug into the power and the network (I used a wired network at my home) and the system was ready to go.
One measure of “cool” for any gizmo is how long it takes before my wife ousts me from custody of the remote and takes over. Time here was about 10 minutes – exceptionally short time / high interest factor.
Also note that your Apple TV is going to want to talk to iTunes running on a computer somewhere on your home network. While my dear wife was tinkering with the setting on the box, I retired to my home office and linked my MacPro to the Apple TV box by opening iTunes. The TV showed a 5 digit code that I had to enter into iTunes to pair them together, and we were connected. The Apple TV showed up like an iPod in the devices menu, and I could move content into it like I could an iPod. In fact that is a great way to think of this – an iPod for your TV.
I had been anticipating buying this machine for a couple of weeks, and had spent some time getting video ready for it either by converting it from DVD into MPEG4 using Media Fork (formerly known as Hand Brake) and downloading some episodes from my favorite TV shows from the web (via BitTorrent) and purchase from the iTunes store). The shows downloaded via BitTorrent posed a bit of a problem, as the were set up for playback using the Divx decoder, which is not installed on the Apple TV. There are posts elsewhere on the web that discuss how to dis-assemble your Apple TV and add software to it, but I was not going to do that just yet. Using Roxio Toast I had taken some of the .avi files (from a PC) and re-formatted them to work with iTunes.
With my wife firmly driving the system, I began to download a small collection of music, video and photos to the machine. My wife started sifting through the music, with graphic album covers displayed for each playlist from iTunes. She chose one and started playing music, and was delighted when after 2 mintues of play (and not touching the remote) the Apple TV went into a screen saver mode that was scrolling pictures across the screen, and they looked very good. At this point it was some time before I could try out the video features as she was enthralled by the photos, so I kept downloading more of them to the machine.
Once I did get to try the video portion of this thing out – it also worked easily and with minimal effort. Video was crisp and clear, and you could certainly tell older content (like original Star Trek episodes) from newer content like Battlestar Galactica. Older content, even ripped at a high data rate from DVD seemed soft and fuzzy. Newer content tended to look very crisp. Animated content, such as episodes of Futurama were light years better than when broadcast on Adult Swim / Cartoon Network.
While you can’t (to my knowledge) get any High Def content from the iTunes store, I was able to download some, and convert to a compatible format. The results were outstanding (Battlestar Galactica) and the Apple TV system played back the video file evenly and smoothly.
Conclusions
All in all, a tremendous first release of the product. If you think back to the first generation iPod, one can get very excited about where the Apple TV is likely going to end up in 5-7 years, Apple correctly took a minimal compelling feature set and brought it to market at an attractive and achievable price.
Things that are great
Apple got a lot of things right with this first release of Apple TV, here are just a few:
Things that need work
Like all first generation products, there is plenty of new territory left to expand into. In my opinion there are quite a few areas that would make the Apple TV even more attractive:
Bugs and quirks
Category: Information Technology, Reviews, Video