Apple TV Product Review

Evil

My apple tv came in the mail yesterday. I immediately hooked it up and have been using it ever since... IT'S AWESOME. I love it. I haven't actually used any of the "TV" features in apple tv yet, just the music features, which is really why I bought it.

My Setup

apple tv basicallys let me (automatically) sync my entire itunes library over to the apple tv hard drive. the apple tv is in turn connected to my flatscreen tv (Panasonic TH-50PX60U), which is then connected to the home theater speaker system (Panasonic SC-HT940). The apple tv supports HDMI output, but I'm already using the 2 HDMI ports on my Panasonic TV, so I had to use the component video and component audio outputs on the apple tv, which I guess is OK. The Panasonic TV connects to the home theater system via HDMI. The cool thing about HDMI is that it allows 2-way digital communication between devices, so for example, when I'm playing music on the apple TV, my Panasonic TV knows to automatically shut off its own speakers and play everything through the home theater system speakers, which are of course, much better.

This sure beats my old setup for playing music, which consisted of an Apple Airport Express connected to the home theater speaker system via a 3.5mm analog mini-Audio jack. (Booo!) In this setup, I'd play music in iTunes and stream it over the air (AirTunes) on the wireless network and into my speaker system. That's still pretty cool though, right? But one of the downsides is that it's inefficient to stream music through the wireless network every time you play a song, because it slows down my wireless network for other stuff that I might be doing at the same time. Also, when there was a lot of network traffic, the music sometimes got choppy, even with the maximum buffer length allowed by iTunes.

apple TV - The Good

Well, definitely the looks, but that's obvious. And at $300, the cost is reasonable. The video output to the TV is amazing. Really takes advantage of the 1080i capabilities of the TV. As opposed to what I used to do, which was connect my MacBook Pro to the TV via DVI. For some reason, I was never able to get good resolution doing it that way. Plus, who wants a stupid DVI wire running from the laptop to the TV anyway? That's sooo uncool (like Manolo).

apple TV - Improvements I'd Like to See

First, they need to get the announced YouTube integration done ASAP!!! C'mon, get on it, people! Watching a blubbery fat kid blubber away in a roller coaster will be even funnier on a 50 inch plasma screen.

In general, the software on apple TV is pretty bare bones. I know this is the first release, but it's still a little disappointing that they didn't build in more features. For example, I'd definitely like to see more screen savers. Right now, you get to choose between having an apple logo bop around your screen or having a collage of your iPhoto photos, which can also be sync'd over from your computer. They should implement the Visualizer effect in iTunes -- no brainer!

Overall Rating

Overall, I'd give apple tv 4 stars (out of 5). Once they get YouTube videos integrated, it'll be totally kick ass at 4.5 stars. And with some additional software features to make things more customizable, apply tv could easily be the first 5-star product rated by The Hose since the bread slicer.