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Review: Apple TV
Leader:
Apple formally announced the Apple TV—previously known as the "iTV"—at Macworld in January of this year. The device was meant to revolutionize the way we watch television through the use of streaming content and iTunes. The announcement also came at a time when Apple announced the iPhone and officially changed the company name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc.—a move that indicated the company's seriousness in focusing more on lifestyle products for the general consumer than just computers. Apple wanted into every facet of our lives, including our living rooms.
And so after several delays attributed mostly to unfinished software among the rumor mill, the Apple TV finally started shipping on March 20. Fans and critics alike eagerly looked forward to its release, so that we could decide once and for all how Apple could compete in the quickly-saturating downloads-to-TV market.
I personally feel that I approached the Apple TV from a slightly different perspective than most of Apple's prospective customers. I have had a Mac mini hooked up to my TV ever since the mini's launch in 2005 (and then replacing it with a Mac mini core solo a year ago) acting as an HTPC-like device for all of my non-live-TV needs. The mini was able to stream music and video content through iTunes from other Macs and PCs in the house—just as the Apple TV can—but could also play a wide variety of other files, acted as a DVD player, and also as a DVR with the use of an Elgato eyeTV. It is a fully-fledged computer, after all, with the TV as its monitor.
But there are some limits to using the mini in this way. With the G4 mini, I had to use an external mouse and keyboard to control the computer (and since I'm lazy and want to plant my butt on the couch the whole time, they had to be wireless). However, all the way from the couch, it was hard at times to read the screen of the mini while searching for files or going through playlists in iTunes. The Intel mini came with Front Row, which made it easier for me to stream iTunes content from elsewhere in the house, with the big, swooping menus.
So what does the Apple TV have to offer me—someone who has been slightly spoiled with the use of a seemingly more versatile device for years now? I tried to examine both how the Apple TV would fare among my family members who are intimidated by even the slightest hint of technology, but also how it would fare among fellow geeks.
Unboxing and setting it up
In true Apple tradition, the Apple TV comes attractively and fashionably packaged. When opened, all important components are laid out simply and elegantly.
The contents of the box include the Apple TV itself, a power cable, an Apple remote, and a booklet for how to set it up.
The Apple TV is a rounded square with sides that measure just under 8 inches apiece. It's a little heavier than it looks upon first blush (no doubt due to the hard drive inside, among other things) at 2.4 pounds. Comparatively, the Mac mini is only about 6.5 inches on each side, weighs almost the same (2.9 pounds), and is about twice as thick as the Apple TV.
Unfortunately, the device does not come with the required cables to hook it up to your TV. On one hand, I can understand why, since the user may need different cables depending on which type of TV he or she has. On the other hand, this (to put it bluntly) sucks. Anyone who buys an Apple TV will have to spend another $20 to $60 on cables on top of the purchase price of the device itself if they want to actually make use of it. For the purposes of this review, I purchased the XtremeMac component, audio, and HDMI cables through Apple. According to Opposable Thumbs' HDMI cable price breakdown, the price I paid for the HDMI cable (about $20) was actually relatively cheap in comparison with most of the others.
Despite many of the "first looks" saying otherwise, the Apple TV does in fact work with both HDTVs and boring, old, standard definition television sets. The key here is that the SDTVs must have component ports in order to hook up to the Apple TV—something that not all SDTVs have. If you are a SDTV owner and are interested in an Apple TV, all hope is not lost for you, but make sure that you have component ports on your TV first before purchasing the Apple TV. Luckily for me, mine did, and I used the component and audio cables to hook the device up to my home TV. For users with HDTVs with HDMI ports, only an HDMI cable is needed.
The complete list of ports on the back of the Apple TV are as follows: power, USB (according to Apple, for diagnostic purposes only), Ethernet, HDMI, three component ports (RGB), two audio ports, and optical audio.
Setting up the Apple TV is extremely simple. After hooking up the appropriate cables to the appropriate ports on the television, the Apple TV is automatically powered on by plugging it in. There is no on/off button on the device—it's obviously meant to be left on most of the time. This may work some power-saving enthusiasts into a tizzy, but you can put the Apple TV into standby mode by pressing and holding the play/pause button on the remote for about six seconds. The Apple TV can be reset by pressing the menu and - buttons at the same time for about six seconds.
Upon displaying a rather visually-pleasing startup movie, the Apple TV asks what language you'd like it to use, and then what resolution you want. On an SDTV, the Apple TV appears to automatically select 480i as its default resolution, but you are able to select any resolution from the list. I had initially worried that resolution selection would perplex people like my parents, who wouldn't know terms like 1080i from 480p any better than they know how to identify a RAM chip out of a collection of circuit boards. However, while the screen may go berserk upon selecting an incompatible resolution, the Apple TV reverts back to the default, functional resolution if the user fails to confirm his or her choice after a short period of time. On the 42 inch HDTV that I tested the device out with, the Apple TV selected 720p as the default resolution.
The Apple TV then tries to connect to a wireless network, and allows you to choose among a list of networks that it sees. The device supports up to 802.11n for high-speed streaming and syncing, but also has a wired Ethernet port for those oldschool users. Entering a password for a protected WAP is slightly annoying with the on-screen alphabet (especially for long passwords) but not difficult.
From there, navigating the menu system is practically as intuitive and simple as navigating an iPod. There are options to navigate through Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts, Photos, Settings, and Sources.
In the Settings menu, you can adjust things such as HDMI brightness, turn on and off the clicking sound effects when you navigate through the menus, pair new remotes with the system, change languages, turn on and off Apple's "Sound Check"—a feature that tries to normalize the volume of music across your music library so that you're not surprised by suddenly loud songs after listening to quieter ones—and update the device's software. When the user selects this option, the Apple TV finds updated software automatically from the Internet and updates itself without any further user interaction. This should make it simple in the future for Apple to push through updates to its stripped-down version of OS X on the device, as well as firmware updates and the like.
However, nothing can be done with the Apple TV except watch TV and movie trailers without hooking up some external sources. The Apple TV can stream content from any Mac or PC that is running iTunes, and sync with one "home" computer. Syncing allows you to copy music, video, and photos directly to the Apple TV's internal hard drive instead of having to stream it, which would put the stability and quality of the stream at the whim of the network it is traveling over. Syncing also makes it easy to put a bunch of content onto the Apple TV and then take it somewhere else, such as a friend's house. Syncing can occur when user-initiated from the computer, whenever iTunes on the computer picks up that the Apple TV has appeared (say if you had disconnected it for some reason and then reconnected it, or rebooted the machine), or whenever you start up iTunes. It's not totally clear whether iTunes automatically syncs with the Apple TV periodically on its own, although there don't appear to be settings for the user to decide how often and when that happens at this time. To answer some of our forum-goers' questions, any season passes from the iTunes Store will show up on your computer whenever they typically show up and will eventually sync with the Apple TV upon iTunes startup or Apple TV detection (or whenever user-initiated). That content can be streamed at any time, however, whenever they are available via the user's iTunes library--assuming that it's set up to stream to the Apple TV.
In order to stream content from a computer, the user must tell the Apple TV to connect to a new iTunes library. It then displays a code on the screen which must be entered onto the desired computer. When the Apple TV is in this mode, iTunes on the computer displays an Apple TV icon in its list on the left. Entering the code from the TV then authorizes the Apple TV to stream content from that iTunes library.
Voilá! You can now stream from any iTunes library of your choosing. Apple TV can stream anything that iTunes can play. Almost. We'll get to that momentarily.
The Apple TV can list content (namely TV content) by date or grouped by show, with the listing on the right side of the screen and the show title, description, and other information to the left. This same behavior is found in the movie listing on the Apple TV.
Encoding your own
Apple doesn't exactly make it simple to watch much content that's not from iTunes, and the Apple TV was clearly meant to be an iTunes portal for the living room. The Apple TV's spec page indicates that it supports a very limited number of file formats: anything from the iTunes store, H.264-encoded movies, and MPEG-4 video. For the average user, these will likely be fine, and it's not hard encoding one's own movies to fit one of these formats. On the Mac, a user can employ QuickTime Pro ($29 from Apple) to open a number of different formats and then encode them "for Apple TV":
movietoappletv.jpg
This is one of the simplest solutions and requires the least thinking. There are also several turn-key applications for the Mac targeted for iPod encoding such as ViddyUp (formerly Podner) ($9.95) and iSquint (Free) that can be adjusted to produce video files in resolutions more appropriate for the Apple TV. There are other, open source projects like FFMpegX that offer more precise control over the final product and applications like HandBrake that allow for complete DVD to iPod/Apple TV/iTunes-compatible video file workflows.
Once a video is exported for Apple TV, the user can then import the movie into his or her iTunes library and display it on the Apple TV through the "Movies" submenu given that your file conforms to specific resolution and bitrate parameters specified on the Apple TV specifications page:
- H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): Up to 5 Mbps, Progressive Main Profile (CAVLC) with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps)
- MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps (maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps)
But what if you want to do more than encode your own home movies for display through the Apple TV? For example, someone who happens to have high-definition video files might want to stream or sync those with the Apple TV in order to watch them on the TV instead of the computer screen. As it turns out, "the Apple TV can play anything iTunes can play" is not entirely true, as some formats that are encoded properly for import into iTunes cannot be played on the Apple TV. As quote above, the Apple TV needs to have MPEG4 and H.264 encoded video that do not exceed certain parameters. This means that, for example, if you were to encode a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a 1280x720 MPEG4, iTunes would play the file without issue, but when instructed to sync this file to the Apple TV, an error would be produced and the file would not be synced. It's unclear whether or not this is an artificial limitation applied by iTunes to keep files that may play poorly on the Apple TV from degrading the overall experience, or whether the hardware on the Apple TV is simply incapable of accepting these files. We're assuming the former for the time being.
If encoded in an Apple TV-friendly way, however, HD content can be played on the Apple TV without incident. One option for watching HD content through the Apple TV would be to use a TV tuner, such as the eyeTV 500 on the Mac, to record HD video. You can then have the software automatically encode the recorded shows or movies for iPod/Apple TV, which would then be able to be played through the Apple TV. Since the iTunes Store does not currently offer video content in HD, encoding your own is currently the only way to take advantage of the Apple TV's HD capabilities.
Video quality
Since your own HD content will display as expected on an HDTV, let's focus on the entire purpose of the product for a moment: acting as a trojan horse to get people to buy more iTunes content. As mentioned previously, the iTunes Store does not currently have any video content available in HD, including the movie trailers that are streamed directly to the Apple TV. This is obviously a huge limitation for not just the Apple TV, but the iTunes Store itself. But the fact that Apple has released the Apple TV with HD capabilities shows that the company doesn't plan to keep iTunes that way for long. Who knows how long it may take to see HD content show up on iTunes, but I would not expect it to be any more than several months from now. Apple would be just plain stupid to bait us with the HD carrot and then not deliver with any purchasable content in HD.
So for now, we'll have to make do with what we have. On a SDTV, content from the iTunes Store, as played through the Apple TV, looks fine and comparable to any other TV show. However, if your SDTV is set to its default screen ratio settings (which it most likely is), the Apple TV attempts to horizontally squish the video content down to fit the screen. For example, episodes of The Office come in widescreen format from the iTunes Store, but when viewed on an SDTV, it's not cropped or letterboxed. Oddly, this squishing phenomenon also happens with content from iTunes that is not in widescreen format as well—anything that comes in 4:3 also gets squished down, and results in black bars on the right and left side of the screen. Everyone's faces are stretched.
However, this phenomenon isn't irreparable. I was able to change the ratio settings on my SDTV to display in 16:9 instead of 4:3, which resulted in letterboxed video display from the Apple TV if the content is widescreen, and "normal" display if the content is not. This option is certainly better than watching elongated faces.
On an HDTV, the currently-available content from iTunes is obviously not going to take advantage of the TV's capabilities. However, despite some early claims of "blurriness," I found that how the Apple TV displays the content on an HDTV is more akin to what I described as "jpeggy-ness." The Apple TV is forced to scale up the video resolution for the HDTV, but it attempts to compensate for the expected blurry pixels by anti-aliasing in between to create cleaner lines. I watched a trailer for the movie 300 streamed from the iTunes Store on the 42 inch HDTV along with a handful of young professionals—absolutely none of which batted an eye at the video quality whatsoever (in fact, there were several comments about how good it looked). Regardless, to an HDTV aficionado or anyone looking closely at the lines, the somewhat "painted" look of the video is obvious.
Again, all that can be done is to encode your own HD videos—an extra step that some may not consider to be worth their time—or wait for Apple to add HD content to iTunes.
In our experiments, while the Apple TV selects standard-definition trailers in it's "Theatrical Trailer" section, it's completely possible to download 720p HD trailers from Apple's trailer website, add them to your iTunes library, and to stream & sync these high resolution trailers directly to the Apple TV. Apple has probably chosen to go the low-resolution route with trailers to improve perceived responsiveness in regards to download times with the disadvantage of scaled and filtered video.
Music
Streaming music to the Apple TV is as simple as streaming video. You can navigate through your playlists easily from any computer that's set up as a source, or through whatever has been synced to the Apple TV's hard drive. The Apple TV supports AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV audio formats—practically anything that iTunes can play. The user can play podcasts and audio books that are bought from iTunes, but not audiobooks that have been bought through other iTunes-compatible sources like Audible.com. This has enraged many an audiobook fan, and it's not entirely clear what the reason for this limitation is.
The visual display when music is playing is pretty boring though: a progress bar and a picture of the album art to the side. Apple could have done more with that. The screen saver mode on the Apple TV is significantly more interesting when set to use album art:
Limitations
We've already gone over some of the limitations of the Apple TV, including its inability to play most video formats out of the box and the lack of HD content on iTunes (and therefore the near inability to make use of one of the Apple TV's features unless you roll your own). However, there are other limitations as well.
First, there's the 40GB hard drive, that actually offers just under 33GB of space. Formatting and the stripped-down version of OS X eat up some of the total hard drive's space, leaving users with a pretty limited amount of space if they want to sync any considerable amount of content to it. Let's be realistic: there are iPods out there with more storage space than the Apple TV. Although I personally don't have much interest in syncing content from my computer with the Apple TV, I know that some people are very disappointed in this limited storage space.
The user also cannot adjust the volume of the Apple TV through the use of the included Apple Remote. This seems like an odd limitation, as the Apple Remote allows for volume adjustment through Front Row on normal Macs, and Steve Jobs has touted in the past the simplicity of the Apple Remote without losing any functionality. Some have said that DVD players and the like don't allow volume control through the remote and therefore the Apple TV's inability to do so isn't really a downfall, but critics have been unimpressed by that explanation. The + and - buttons on the remote are put to other use—navigating the menu interface by scrolling up and down. This has irritated many early adopters who were not expecting to use more than one remote with the Apple TV. It appears to come down to an issue of whether Apple should have engineered a new remote for use with the Apple TV, or stuck with consistency (the option they seem to have chosen) for consistency's sake. Although it doesn't bother me that much personally, it does seem like a strange quirk that ought to be worked out in the future. Fortunately for people who truly hate this (or any other) limitation of the Apple Remote, you can pair nearly any TV remote you want with the Apple TV. During one day of testing at a friend's apartment, we used a Universal Remote MX500 with the Apple TV that had been previously programmed by hand to match the Apple Remote that he was using with his Mac mini.
Although Apple makes no claims regarding the Apple TV's ability to play surround sound, it is being seen as a major sticking point among audiophiles. To be sure about the Apple TV's audio capabilities, I enlisted the help of a friend of mine, one of our readers, and fellow forum member John Averitt. What we found confirmed most people's fears: Apple TV is limited to playing files that are present in iTunes, which limits the number of 5.1 file types. A 5.1 AAC QuickTime movie gave only 2-channel sound through the Apple TV, or (at best) Dolby Digital Pro Logic II when played through the optical connection. This is different than FrontRow behavior on a Mac mini—Front Row uses QuickTime and all of its associated plugins. With Front Row, Dolby Digital (AC3) encoded audio can be output through the optical cable, giving "true" surround sound. Since there is no way (that we know of) to play Dolby Digital or DTS encoded audio in iTunes, that leaves AAC 5.1 for the Apple TV, which the device treats the same way as a default 10.4 QuickTime install does—by putting all five channels into two. So, there is no 5.1 surround sound, just the older ProLogic II, two-channel Dolby format.
The inclusion of the optical port like all the other HD settings suggests that Apple is going to start selling or at least thinking about selling HD5.1 content. If that wasn't the case, Apple could have made a much cheaper media extender for the iTunes Store than the Apple TV to handle their current content.
However, what I consider to be the biggest limitation of all—and what would absolutely stop me personally from buying it as an average consumer—would be that users cannot buy content directly from iTunes via the Apple TV. Other download-to-TV services, such as the Unbox and TiVo partnership and Xbox Live Video, allow users to browse selections from their respective online stores and download right there, on the spot, via the device itself.
Why can't the Apple TV do this with iTunes? Although there have been some very loose explanations floating around (such as the excuse that such a feature would require a keyboard to navigate), there is essentially no technical reason for this not to happen. Apple seems like the perfect candidate to write an interface for the Apple TV that could navigate movies and TV shows separated out by genre, new releases, popular downloads, or simply list them alphabetically.
Perhaps one explanation for why Apple has not yet done this is because the Apple TV does not require you to use up one of your precious FairPlay authorizations, which is actually one of the plusses of the current system in my eyes. It can stream content from any computer without that user having to authorize the Apple TV, unlike the mini which does require an authorization before streaming content from another iTunes library. But this could be one detail (probably among many) that would make purchasing from the Apple TV difficult, as the user would have to associate an iTunes account with the Apple TV. Surely there must be some solution to this, and it is my personal "major" sticking point on this product.
Hacks
Lets just get this out of the way. The Apple TV is, without a doubt, running OS X. Obviously using this machine to type your thesis in Word is going to be difficult as Apple has gone to certain lengths to extremely limit the ways in which it will input and output information. What do we know so far? Dissections of the hardware reveal exactly what most suspected, it's essentially a Mac with a Pentium M processor (Dotham) and an NVIDIA GPU comprising its principal powerhouses. Inside is a standard 2.5" 4200RPM laptop hard drive that has to date been the primary source of almost all of the hacks being developed. It should go without saying that with such an easily removed hard drive that contains a stripped down version of OS X, it has been surprisingly easy to coax the Apple TV into doing things it wasn't "designed" to do.
The operating system on the disk is a stripped down version of OS 10.4.7 and lacks several things that would allow you to use the machine as a general purpose computer. First, the drive has several partitions. There is at least one partition for the operating system which is mounted as read-only (the second is where all of the media files are stored, a third contains a fresh copy of the OS for factory restores). Next, there are no drivers installed to support any input devices besides the IR remote. This means that a mouse and keyboard cannot be used in the provided USB port located on the back of the unit. Both of these initial hurdles are easily overcome by adjusting how the filesystems are mounted and then remounting them. Adding in drivers for generic USB keyboards and mice should also be easy enough to copy over and install once someone with enough expertise in those matters gets involved—there have already been attempts by several individuals that haven't yielded any useful results.
The first, and perhaps most obvious hack was to clone the built-in hard drive to another, larger hard drive. There have been several accounts of individuals replacing the "tiny" 40GB models with much faster, 7200RPM 120GB models. This has also led to the release of a disk image of the contents of the Apple TV disk to the Internet at large via several BitTorrent trackers with the hopes of allowing more adept hackers without direct access to a unit to do some hacking of their own. It should be noted that downloading and using this disk image is almost certainly against Apple's EULA and we here at Ars Technica do not condone the downloading and installation of this image.
The second biggest hurdle is that the default install of OS X on the Apple TV lacks any way to remotely connect (SSH/SFTP, ARD). There are two mechanisms in place that prevent this. The first is that the firewall on the Apple TV is locked down tight, only allowing in and out connections on those ports essential to iTunes sharing, syncing, and retrieving information from the iTunes store (trailers and such). Secondly, there is no SSH daemon even present on the disk. This means that in order to begin messing around with the device's filesystem you need to remove and externally mount the disk at least once to add a script to disable the firewall, copy over the SSH daemon, and configure launchd to orchestrate these pieces when the Apple TV boots up.
Once you've got sshd going on the machine you've opened it up to a lot of other interesting things. While there is no Finder installed on the device (this might be considered an improvement by some) there is obviously still a window manager running. Several individuals have been able to install VLC and other applications via the terminal and instruct them to run just fine. However, the lack of any useful keyboard or mouse support limits the amount of interaction you can have with those applications. Other things possible with this hack are enabling the AFP server which should allow for mounting the drive over the network, installing and enabling Apache; homebrew web-interface to the Apple TV, anyone? I don't see why things like installing distcc to allow the Apple TV to act as a cheap compile node for your Xcode projects wouldn't also be possible as well as any number of standard daemons, python/perl/ruby scripts, and more.
Probably the most actively pursued hack right now is to find an easy and convenient way to trick the Apple TV into discovering and playing video files of all types (XViD, MKV, etc.) from local, generic, SMB and AFP shares (as opposed to simply iTunes libraries). So far, this has been successfully demonstrated with a tedious and manual process combining some of the hacks above along with Perian; there is work underway to automate this discovery and injection process, but it seems as if it will be weeks or months before we have a nice, general purpose MCE-like solution for the Apple TV.
One final note, it's also come to light that several Automator scripts are present on the device for capturing audio and video, which may point to future Apple or 3rd party hacks that allow the capture of video off a broadcast signal, digital camera, or video camcorder.
Innards
As said previously, the Apple TV is nothing more than an Intel-based computer running last-generation hardware. Obviously Apple has gone to lengths to make it appear as if the device has a very limited set of input (IR remote) and output (HDMI/Component, optical & composite audio) options, but as we've seen over the past few days, there are efforts underway to remedy that. The fact that the device is more or less a general purpose computer leaves itself open to these sorts of hacks, but we're not so sure Apple really took that many conscious precautions to dissuade this behavior or that they specifically care.
The machine is significantly easier to open and take apart than the Mac mini traditionally has been. Rather than a Sarlak's pit of clips that require four hands to manipulate, the Apple TV is held shut with only four T8 screws. Inside, the hardware is nicely laid out and the innards aren't nearly as cluttered as you might imagine. Inside is nothing more than a motherboard, fan, WiFi card, hard disk, and power supply unit. The internal nature of the power supply is much appreciated other those external models on the mini and new 802.11n Airport Extreme. There's nothing I hate more than a bulky brick, no matter how pretty and white it is.
As stated earlier, the hard disk is a PATA 4200RPM 40GB 2.5-inch laptop drive that's easily removed and replaced with larger models. The CPU is soldered directly to the motherboard and is an Intel Pentium M (Dothan) running at 1GHZ. The CPU is attached to an Intel 945G north bridge that's connected to a bank of 256MB of DDR2 memory that's, again, soldered directly to the board. The typically paltry amount of system memory should be more than enough for the single-purpose nature of the Apple TV, but will probably end up frustrating those looking to hack to device to do more than browse the family photo album or watch Battlestar Galactica.
The GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 with 64MB of dedicated video memory. Several dissectors have been extremely surprised that Apple chose to go with this dedicated solution as it appears that the Intel chipset in the Apple TV already has its own graphics capabilities.
Probably the most interesting item on the motherboard is an unlabeled four-pin header that is suspected to be the second USB port listed by a dump of the system profile. While there is only one external USB port that serves no apparent purpose, a peek through the system information lists two ports and it's suspected that this unconnected, internal four-pin header may be this second port. It is also suspected that this internal port may be unrestricted in what's connected to it and may facilitate the connection of external USB hard drives, external DVD/HD-DVD drives, input devices, and more.
It looks like there's a bright future ahead of this device as far as hackery goes. While there are going to be some inherent limitations as far as system memory and processing speed go, it's extremely plausible that a method may exist in the upcoming months that may allow a user to convert their Apple TV into a much more capable HTPC solution on par with Microsoft's Media Center product or perhaps even MythTV.
Conclusions
Out of the box, the Apple TV isn't meant to be used as a computer. It cannot share an Internet connection with another device, and it cannot broadcast music to Apple's Airport Express. You cannot attach an eyeTV to it, or any other TV tuner for that matter (and therefore it cannot record TV shows). It can't play most codecs out of the box, you can't buy content directly from the iTunes Store, and it has very limited tech specs. These are all things that I can do and/or upgrade on my Mac mini, so switching from the mini to the Apple TV first seems like a major functionality downgrade.
That said, the Apple TV is ridiculously easy to use and the menu system makes me prefer it over the mini. Let's be honest here: laziness prevails, even when we don't want to admit it. Sure, I can record shows on my mini through the eyeTV, but that requires me to get out the mouse and keyboard, sit three feet in front of the TV so that I can read all of the text, make sure everything is set up correctly, and hope that the application doesn't beachball, freeze up, or crash between the time I set up the recording and the time the recording is actually supposed to happen. Therefore, I tend to avoid it and not record shows that I would otherwise want to record. Despite having the ability to record it myself, I have a season pass to "The Office" on iTunes because it's easier this way. Somehow, I get the feeling that if Apple were to incorporate some sort of DVR functionality into the Apple TV, the process would be significantly less convoluted and I would not avoid it so much (although I acknowledge that this desire of mine is mere fantasy and will never happen, as the Apple TV is obviously designed to sell content from iTunes, not allow me to record my own). The same goes for buying content from iTunes. I can do that on the Mac mini, but again, it would require me to sit on the floor right in front of the TV, armed with keyboard and mouse, in order to navigate through the store and find what I want. I have full confidence that in a slightly-less fantasy word than above, the Apple TV would make that experience much better.
Of the very limited things the Apple TV can do, it does well. Setting it up is simple, navigating it is simple, syncing with it is simple, and streaming content to it is simple. It's a pleasure to use in this way. I, and most of you probably, just wish Apple would add more features.
I'd almost like to give the Apple TV two scores: one for our audience, and one for everybody else. Geeks are more likely than anyone else to hate the Apple TV as it is, out of the box. There are currently too many limitations to justify the price to many of us, although the potential is there for Apple to push down a few major software/firmware updates and make this device into (almost) everything we wish it could be. Hacking the Apple TV is pretty simple though, so for the technically inclined, perhaps some of those limitations could be solved with just a little bit of old fashioned elbow grease.
However, almost everyone else who witnessed the Apple TV in action in my presence fell in love with it instantaneously. The look and feel of both the device itself and its functionality impressed all those who touched it. I would not worry whatsoever about my technophobic parents' ability to set up the Apple TV and use it on a daily basis. They would probably love it and give it a name to compliment the dog's. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my mother will probably call me after reading this review asking whether I plan to keep mine.
So where does that put us? Based on what I think the potential is for the Apple TV, combined with how I think most average people will use the device, I would have no problem giving it an 8 or higher. Based on the current feature set and how much I desire certain features (out of the box) that don't currently exist, though, I have to give it a 6.
Pros
Cons