Thoughts on the AppleTV
Well, I went out and got the AppleTV yesterday… at the Apple Store in Soho — Best Buy was closer, but they were out of stock. The fact that I’d seen that it does 480i as long as you have component video inputs allowed me to venture forth despite not having an HD TV.
It’s cute. No complaints from Amy about some ugly piece of equipment… though it’s hard to complain about anything that sits above the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8100 DVR that Time Warner gives us the privelege of renting. I haven’t noticed any noise from the unit itself… and I haven’t felt it for heat… so I can’t comment about that.
Use is pretty simple. The bigger of the two pains in the asses for setup was entering the hex string for my wireless network’s WEP key. Tiny, simplistic remote… long string of digits. The smaller of the two pains was in linking it to an iTunes library. I was chillin’ in the living room, and it was a matter of having to get up to enter a code.
I don’t quite see why I should have to do that if browsing someone’s collection, and even playing… since I can play from multiple while only syncing with one…
The 40GB (33GB Free) of HD space is insufficient to sync my entire collection of music and my newly ripped movies (ripped on the Mini I bought last week… MediaFork rocks). Looks like maybe I should have gotten one of these units from PowerMax. Rather than upgrading an aTV that you bought stock, just buy a pre-upgraded one! 120GB probably would be fine for a while.
I wish I could plug in a USB2 external drive into the AppleTV. I have a 500GB Cavalry unit from Buy.com on the way (well, it should have been shipped, but it hasn’t — supplier issues?) which would be fine… though it was for the Mini in my mind.
I still haven’t gotten to using the Mini for my primary workstation for more than an hour or so. Maybe it was the IRC client options… I like mIRC. Whichever… I’ve been keeping the Mini busy with MediaFork ripping movies. That can be its job for now.
Add comment April 8th, 2007
