That’s right, I am the one who wanted one. Over the weekend my family was in town and we exchanged gifts for Christmas a little early (some of my family members live a few hours away so now was the time). What did I find under the Christmas tree this year? An Apple TV.I have to say I was pretty excited to hook it up and I wasn’t really disappointed. The first frustration came soon after I hooked up when I realized that my 25GB iTunes library won’t exactly transfer over 802.11g to the Apple TV in a matter of minutes. I decided to stream the content just for that night and than the next morning actually transfer everything to it.
The transfer took about 30 minutes after I wired the Apple TV through a router to my laptop on the living room floor.
I downloaded a few episodes of some choice HD podcasts (namely a bunch of Revision 3 podcasts). I had the Apple TV output 1080i to my 42″ Vizio LCD and let me tell you the HD podcasts looked great.
I tried watching some content purchased from the iTunes store and although it didn’t look stunning it was quite a bit better than it looked watching the same content being output from my 5g iPod. Watching YouTube is fun, Apple has made it very easy to browse around with that little remote giving you some related videos after the currently playing video finishes.
It was incredibly easy to set up and drop dead simple to put content on it, from the two days that I’ve spent with it I can only find three problems with it:
- It gets really hot
- The Apple Remote doesn’t give you any volume control
- It doesn’t do enough
What the Apple TV does do it does very well and I’m not really sure what else I would like it to do but I want more out of my Apple TV, I know that it is capable of doing so.
Apple, let me watch Joost, let me connect an HDTV tuner to it and record TV shows, and by god let me purchase content directly from the Apple TV!
Even though I have some gripes with it, it has really helped to simplify my living room.