Full disclosure: I am an Apple fan. My first experience with the fruit was an Apple IIe in grade school. Hours spent programming “counting to infinity” with BASIC. I recently upgraded my wireless router to an AirPort Extreme, own an iPod and (my favorite baby of all) an Aluminum iMac. Between that early grade school experience and finally beginning the shift to an Apple Household 2 years ago, I was all Windows. By that point, I was tired of the blue screen of death and random freezes. Since the iMac purchase, I have experienced exactly one freeze (which was due to me accidentally opening up all applications at once). Needless to say, the experience has been good so far.
Shortly after Maeve was born last year, we purchased a Canon XSi. The amount of pictures residing on my iMac exploded. We wanted to view our pictures on the TV upstairs. To understand why, I should probably explain my tech setup. In the basement I have the cable modem attached to the Airport BS, which in turn is connected to the iMac. There is a section of the basement dedicated to a projector/quasi theater area. This area is mainly for sports and movies. Out of convenience and baby-raising, we still spend a lot of time in the living room. Thus the desire to view pictures on the TV there. But we also wanted to view other media via a new device. Since we already used iTunes to view shows and listen to music, and Apple TV seemed like a logical choice.
Setting up the Apple TV was easy. Open the box, connect a few wires, authorize the device on my network, sync with iTunes, and viola: digital media bliss. The out of the box OS apparently was old as I was prompted to upgrade. Since I didn’t muck around with operation, I can only comment on the look of the older version. Not pretty. The new UI is an improvement on that front. Let’s talk a bit about the nuts and bolts.
After syncing with iTunes, I could listen to all of my music and watch the few television episodes I had already purchased. HD Rentals were really the biggest draw for me. The selection is just ok, but the quality is excellent. My biggest gripe about Apple TV has to do with this part. You can only download one movie at a time, and it takes awhile to do so wirelessly. We’ve already rented a bunch of movies and I can tell you there is a strategy to it. Once downloaded, you have 30 days to watch the title. Which, IMO is more than enough time. However, once you start the viewing, your purchase will disappear within 24 hours. So by the time Jack Bauer is done saving the world, you will need to watch the whole thing. If you stream Netflix movies, this is pretty much the same thing. Spontaneity used to be an issue due to the whole postal mail thing, but now you can say “Hey, I want to watch District 9 tonight, so I’ll just start the download now.” If you wait until 7PM to start this, be prepared to wait for at least an hour or more to start watching. Apple TV will tell you when the movie is ready to watch, often after 30-50% of the download is complete. Twice we started watching when Apple TV said to do so but the real time caught up with the downloading and we had to wait for a bit to continue watching. That doesn’t make for a great experience.
Overall, we wanted to do three things with the new purchase. Watch pictures/video remotely, listen to music when entertaining/hanging out, and rent HD movies. I agree with Amazon’s 4 out of 5 stars for Apple TV. The downloading issue could have pushed it down to 3.5 stars, but the ultimate ease of setup bumped it back up. If you’re looking to accomplish the same tasks, I whole-heartedly recommend an Apple TV.
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