Einstellungen: Some thoughts on the Apple TV

Posted by David Stempnakowsk Dec 27, 2007 at 4:30pm

A lot has been written about the Apple TV lately and after using one for about six months I thought that I would chime in with some thoughts of my own. I’ve been following a number of articles lately that have said that the Apple TV is a failure and that sales of only 400,000 units are disappointing. While I don’t know if the Apple TV has been as successful as Apple would’ve liked, I have to say that I’m quite satisfied with mine.

I waited until the 160GB model was released. I have over 20GB of music alone and with several seasons of TV shows, like Battlestar Galactica and CSI, I wanted to wait until Apple released a version with sufficient storage capacity for my needs.

Setting up the Apple TV was much like setting up anything from Apple; virtually painless. The biggest annoyance was having to use the on screen keyboard to enter the password for our wireless LAN. At least that’s not something you have to do very often. After that, pairing it with my iTunes account and syncing went easily. It took overnight to copy all my files to the Apple TV, probably because I was still using an Apple 802.11g Airport Extreme. I’ve noticed that syncing shows and video podcast (I’m hooked on Geek Brief TV) is considerably faster since we upgraded to a new Airport 802.11n Gig Ethernet base station.

The main reason I like the Apple TV is because it’s small, simple, connects to my TV and doesn’t require a transformer (it’s dual voltage). As an American living in Germany I like being able to keep up with my favorite TV series. With the Apple TV and iTunes this has been relatively easy to do. My biggest disappointment has not had anything to do with the Apple TV, but with NBC. I had been following the new Battlestar Galactica for the past three seasons, but now that NBC has pulled out of iTunes I don’t have any way to follow the series. It airs now on German television, but the English version is better because a lot of the background sound gets taken out with the English dialog. NBC’s new service is not Mac friendly, and even if it was they block anyone not coming from a US IP address. That’s a shame for about 47,000 US service men and women stationed in Germany who don’t all receive the Armed Forces Network (AFN) or own an AFN decoder. Fortunately, there is still BitTorrent (you guys at NBC know that, right? If you’re not then just Google it).

I had considered the Mac mini but decided against it for several reasons. I like having just the one HDMI cable going from the Apple TV to my television, something I could not have done with a mini. The mini would have required me to have a keyboard and mouse available, even if not always connected. I also prefer to keep my iTunes library on my Mac, and with a mini I would have had to find a way to keep two copies of the library in sync, or I would have had to leave my computer on all the time with iTunes open and share my library (I didn’t want to do that because my Power Mac G5 is noisy when the fans kick in and electricity is not cheap in Germany), or move the library to the mini and learn to live with it. If I moved my library to the mini, then I’d have to also have to have an external hard disk available for backups.

That would mean either purchasing another external HD to connect to the mini (which would add to the cable clutter and also use more electricity) or moving the Drobo off my Mac and onto the Airport Extreme. The later would introduce a handful of other issues, some related to my hardware configuration and some related to issues remaining with OS 10.5.1 and Airport Disk. Lastly is the price. The mini configured with enough RAM, HD space, and SuperDrive would have been only a few hundred dollars cheaper than a new iMac and almost $500 more expensive than the Apple TV. Although, had I gone with the Mac mini I could have also used my Eye TV, but I have digital satellite where I am and not very good over the air reception so I don’t really use the Eye TV anymore. Once I took all those things into consideration the AppleTV was the best choice for me.

Is there room for improvement? Without a doubt. I think a built-in DVD player would increase the functionality and help justify the price of the 160GB model. A Tivo like function would also be a plus. Support for a USB device like one from Elgato which allows DVBT (the European equivalent to ATSC, I believe), or larger external HD would also be a nice feature. Rumor has it that we will see an upgrade to the AppleTV next year. I’m hoping that at least some additional functionality will be available via a software update for existing AppleTV owners. Geek Brief with Cali Lewis is on, got to go.

David covers things from a German perspective. As for the title of this column, if you switch the Mac OS to German, Einstellungen means preferences—but it also means your opinion.—Dennis Sellers

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