Apple TV review

[autoboy]

Original Article Link

The engadget review is pretty fair.  The comments on engadget are not.  It seems like the general geek community forgets what this $99 box is for.  It is a video rental box, music player, and photo player.  It is redbox in your living room.

It is not designed to play your illegally obtained videos in any format you decided to rip them in.  It is not designed to play your torrents.  It isn’t designed to play those because most of the world doesn’t know what that is.  My wife thinks an MKV is a Mazda minivan.  My brother in law thinks a Torrent is a rain storm we rarely see in California.  This box does what they need it to do.  If they expand it with apps, and more streaming solutions like Hulu Plus, then I see no reason to hate on this box.  There are other boxes out there for those who are not satisfied by this little device.

The Apple TV is almost perfectly designed for exactly what it is designed to do.  Play your music, watch your photos, and rent your movies.  The only thing it lacks for that is an analog audio output (3.5mm jack).  720p is perfectly suited to normal US broadband speeds and looks great on most people’s TVs.  1080p wouldn’t be an improvement since the bandwitch isn’t there to make it look good.  I’d rather have 720p without artifacts than bandwidth starved 1080p with artifacts.  AppleTV 720p movies look better than any other streaming solution I’ve seen except for Vudu HDX which I can’t use because I lack the bandwidth.

And no, I am not an Apple Lover.  I use an andriod phone, refuse to buy an iPad (waiting for an andriod tablet) and would never use an Apple computer unless I put Windows 7 on it.

[Mike Garcen]

great comment autoboy, and i think you’re spot on. Look, AppleTV (the original) tried to appease all crowds, and it was clear that wasn’t going to work. I’ve said it before, for users going in and spending $1000+ on a Macbook, then get told about this $99 box to rent movies blah blah, i think they’ll sell an awful lot of them, and kudos to them for investing the effort in audio/video quality.

[autoboy]

I don’t think the AppleTV classic tried to appeal to all users at all.  It’s pretty much the same as the current one except it lacks Netflix and the new UI.  I consider the new AppleTV a little more than a simple hardware refresh that allows the price to drop and the video capability to improve slightly.  I’m not sure the old one could handle HD Netflix.  The graphics card in the old AppleTV was only an underclocked 7300 and it lacked full h.264 decoding while the CPU only ran at 1ghz.

[robinhoody]

I agree with you autoboy, this box is going to appeal to a large number of people who dont want something complicated to set up.  All the techies and many of the apple fanboys ripped apart the Ipad but yet its selling like crazy?  A 100$ is a small fee to pay for an apple device so I can see the device selling well.  It seems they are trying to shoot for complimenting your TV not trying to take it over. 

[robinhoody]

Here’s the tear down of the appletv…pretty cool

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple-TV-2nd-Generation-Teardown/3625/1

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