tombrennan.org

AppleTV…a first glance

January 10th, 2007 | Category: tech, Reviews

OK, I admit I was glued to my PC (I was at work) yesterday reading the play by play of the MacWorld keynote from Steve Jobs. I was excited (but not surprised) that Apple made the AppleTV the first announcement of the speech. The other big news of the day was the iPhone. I don’t want to spend anytime on Apple’s cell phone/iPod/mobile computer. Today I want to talk about the item not being talked about everywhere…the AppleTV.

I was excited when Steve Jobs made the unexpected move a few months back and announced the AppleTV, codename iTV. Not too many details were being released about iTV. Yesterday we got a good look at the MacWorld conference and a better look at Apple’s web site.
The Look
The AppleTV is supposed to be a component that will sit beside (or on top) of your other media components and plug into your TV and stereo. That’s fine. Apple has also done a great job (as always) of making an attractive looking peice of hardware, which is a great selling point for “the ladies” who have a say in purchases in the household. And at $299, it’s not a bad price.

The Specs

The unit does have a 40GB hard drive (for 50 hours of video), wired & wireless networking capabilities, a CPU, and remote. It also has component (analog) outputs as well as digital outputs. The menu system is great for navigating through your library, which can be stored locally or on the network.

The Missing DVD Drive

I have one question: Where’s the DVD drive? There currently is a “format war” over HD-DVD and BluRay-DVD. That may be the reason why Apple forgot the DVD drive in the AppleTV. But I’m a little gun-shy on getting this attractive, nicely priced unit. I don’t want to store all of my DVD’s on my network or on my networked computers. I don’t want to but TV Shows from iTunes and stream them to my AppleTV. I want to watch movies on that I have in my collection or get in the mail on my TV. Right now I watch them on my PS2 with no problem.

I know that I am a fan of Apple and my comments may surprise a few, but I just needed to get that off of my chest. My next post will be much more even tempered…promise.