When I was in college, I lived in a one bedroom condo just off of campus. In this situation, my living room was also my office, dining room, and kitchen. I could run cables along the wall from my computer to my stereo and television so I could listen to my iTunes and watch movies from my computer. Now that I am an adult, running cables all over my condo is no longer acceptable.
How was I going to move music and video files from my home office to my living room? After a few meandering google serches, I settled on the Apple TV.
I don’t own any Apple products other than an iPod (this may change soon, as my Verizon contract is expiring…), so this was a leap of faith. For $329, I purchased the 160GB at the Apple Store. Connecting the Apple TV took just a minute. All this required was connecting a power cord and an HDMI cord to my TV.
After I turned on the device, I began to experience a few difficulties. In order to do ANYTHING with the Apple TV, you must connect it to the internet. Most of us will do this via WiFi. Anyone in the city will have a password protected wireless connection, and you must enter this password into the Apple TV to connect to the network. The only way to interface with the device is through an on screen keyboard. This is terribly cumbersome and time consuming.
Once I connected to my network, I had to let both my Apple TV and desktop (which controls my iTunes library) sit for nearly 48 hours in order to synch the maximum of 160 gigs of music an movies. The synching process is such a resource hog that I literally could not use my computer or my WiFi.
Once I was connected and synched to my computer, I can now easily access the iTunes Store and purchase songs, albums, TV shows, and movies. Many movies are available in HD. All purchases are then synched with my computer, ensuring that I have a backup at all times and can dump them onto my iPod. The process is very simple, except that it will slow down your computer and network to a painful crawl.
The Apple TV not only provides access to your iTunes library and the iTunes Store, but directly to youtube and to your computers picture files. Using an interface similar to the setup interface, you can search the iTunes store or Youtube. The main difficulty with Youtube is that the quality is often so poor that videos are incomprehensible when viewed on a 52 inch television. It takes all the fun out of watching Rack Em Willie. Pictures can viewed as a slide show or used as a screensaver. Alternatively, you can use album covers as your screensaver.
Another issue with the Apple TV is that it is terribly slow when searching through your music – particularly if you have recently made changes to your iTunes library on your computer. This makes the device a poor choice for DJing a party. If you are using the Apple remote to control the Apple TV, you should either select a single album, playlist, or video. Sorting through a large library can take several minutes.
The best feature that the Apple TV provides is one that lets you bypass its interface. From iTunes, you can select to controll “Multiple Speakers” in the drop-down menu in the lower right corner. This allows you to control the Apple TV from iTunes on your computer – this is what I do 90% of the time. You can even select to listen to music through your computer and the Apple TV at the same time! Unfortunately, this feature only works for music and not for videos.
Watching movies on Apple TV is pretty easy because it doesn’t require any text input. You can select the Genere and scroll to the title you’d like to watch. Rentals are $2.99 for most titles and $3.99 for new releases in standard definition. Prices of HD movies range up to nearly $10. A rental allows you 30 days to watch the movie – and 24 hours to finish the movie once you start it.
In summary, the Apple TV is a great addition to a media set-up as long as you are willing to put in the time to set it up and plan on controlling it from your computer the majority of the time. There are plenty of people who hate the Apple TV and you can buy one of their used devices for much less than the MSRP or $329. There is also a 40GB version with an MSRP of $229, but if you plan on using the device for video, I would imagine it will fill up pretty quickly.
I’m lukewarm on this device. Don’t buy it new, there’s no reason to spend that much money on a device that runs slow and sports a crappy user interface.
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