Jobs moves to the heavens with Apple TV

Missing the point

I think Arstechnica said it best:

"What I want, and what I believe the market needs, is a way to simplify the byzantine world of TV and home video. You can't do this by pretending that the rat's nest of cables, contracts, and TV-connected devices in all our lives doesn't exist. Apple's job is to tame this mess, not ignore it."

The job of an apple TV device thingie should be to seamlessly integrate everything in one central location and do so in a way that everyone can use, not limit what you can do for the sake of simplification. Sure it's simple enough to use but that's because there's not much there.

I mean really, a box with an hdmi out that can only play music off itunes? What are 'people' supposed to do with all their existing non-itunes content? Their cable/satellite feeds? Just use iTunes, not that big of deal?

I think 'people' don't need yet another device for your living room that only does a few things, we already have a bunch of those.

Some kind of simplification of an openfiler kind of approach, where you can hot plug drives in there seamlessly while being able to do decoding of 1080p (with potential for higher res..) and also being able to control all the other boxes in the living room so you can record off cable/net/freeview/satellite/whatever. Which is what techies have been doing for ages with various degrees of success. Simple, it is not, however.

Well

It saves Apple 30-60 dollars per unit, so of course they won't do storage on streaming hardware like this, it doesn't even have a SATA-controller to begin with, it takes up time, energy and space. And of course money. Why would you need it when the competitors don't? They just follow the same track here. It's simply not an HTPC with storage, because that track is too expensive. Add in TV-tuners, recording etc and it's up to 400-800 dollar. Have one that's kinda a HTPC and people will complain or ignore it because it isn't a full featured HTPC. While this one they have no problem with, it's cheap and easy to tuck away.

However it's worthless outside of the US. As we don't need more media extenders with format limitations here and usually has no decent access to streaming services. But so is every other streaming services (with boxes) like Amazon VOD and the included capability to use Netflix. The world of immaterial rights is awful.

not just rentals

i think the point is that the disks in the old apple tv got full up very quickly. my iTunes music folder sits of a 4gb raid - i don't want to sync a tv show or a movie over wifi to my apple tv to watch, i just want to stream it directly from my imac to my tv

and the new apple tv is perfect for that, and priced reasonably too

personally i think they've done a very good job of identifying what was wrong with the first version and trimming it down to just what is needed and i can't wait for my pre-order to arrive in a couple of weeks time

Not an upgrade

the new small form factor and the aluminium remote are quite cool but with the lack of on-board storage means that installing something like XBMC will require an external drive, arguably a little clumsy, even if it's possible.

given that the menu system looks to be the same as before I'd say that the new ATV is still based upon OSX 10.4 rather than iOS so all the old hacks should still work.

The rental only works fine for me as most films I'll only watch the once and the BD is getting ever more ridiculous with the amount of crap you have to go through before your film comes on (warnings, downloaded updates, downloaded menus, trailers, 'you wouldn't download a car' warnings, more warnings, promos telling you how great BD's are all unskipable and on top of the fantastically slow speed of the players makes it all a bit rubbish). Would still prefer physical media for any purchases though but for a rental a download is fine just as long as I don't have to wait for it to start, with the current ATV it's about 4 hours from hitting the buy button before the film is available, almost as long as it takes my BD player to power up.

Note the US site has TV shows for rental but the UK one doesn't, no doubt some bullshit license problem so I'll stick with BitTorrent for those for now.