.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Hands on with the (somewhat infuriating) Apple TV
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY The Apple TV is Apple’s first set-top box, designed to play your iTunes movies and music through your TV and home entertainment system. Like most Apple products, it’s both impressive and disappointing, inspired and crippled. We love it, but we’re not sure we like it.
.OTHER
We recently got the opportunity to take a look at the Apple TV. If you’re one of the many who’ve been inundated under the unending iPhone hype, you might have missed the relatively low-key introduction of the Apple TV some months earlier.
The Apple TV is Apple’s first set-top box, designed to play your iTunes movies and music through your TV and home entertainment system. Like most Apple products, it’s both impressive and disappointing, inspired and crippled. We love it, but we’re not sure we like it.
.CALLOUT If you’ve seen all those TV commercials touting how you can watch YouTube on the iPhone, you’ve been seriously misled.
As you can see in Figure A, the Apple TV looks like a half-height Mac Mini. It’s small and is almost unnoticeable among all the rest of the gear in our entertainment center.
.FIGPAIR A The Apple TV is the svelt silver box on top.
.TEASER Should you buy this thing? Tap here to read our full review.
.H1 What it does
Let’s start with what the Apple TV does, when it does it right. Assuming everything works (which, as we’ll see in a minute, is an improbable assumption), the Apple TV connects up to five PCs or Macs running iTunes. The Apple TV will sync with one such machine, and stream from the others — up to the available storage on the Apple TV’s relatively small 40GB hard drive. There’s also a 160GB version, which we did not test. The 40GB model is $299, the 160GB model is $399.
If you’ve got one machine with a pile of music and video files, the Apple TV will reach out and download those music files and video files from the first machine, up to the capacity of the drive. It’ll then play the music and video right off it’s own drive. For the other iTunes hosts, the Apple TV will merely stream the media and play it back.
As you can see in Figure B, the Apple TV has a very clean, couch-friendly interface.
.FIGPAIR B The Apple TV interface is quite clean and easy to use.
As you can also see in Figure B, the Apple TV appears to play YouTube videos right on your TV. Which brings us to the Apple TV’s many, many, many, many limitations.
.H1 YouTube limitations
Since we’ve just seen the YouTube screenshot, let’s start with the Apple TV’s YouTube playback. If you think that supporting YouTube means you can play any YouTube video you want, think again. Most YouTube videos are in Flash format. Apple TV doesn’t support Flash. If that seems like a fatal gotcha, you’d be right.
Apple TV only supports videos converted to the H.264 codec, which is one of Apple’s favored formats. Of the five million or so videos on YouTube, maybe ten thousand have H.264 support. By the way, we understand this is also a limitation of the iPhone, so if you’ve seen all those TV commercials touting how you can watch YouTube on the iPhone, you’ve been seriously misled. You can watch a few YouTube videos, but only a few.
YouTube search is also terrible. If you don’t want to play one of the featured videos, and you try to search for a video you like on the Apple TV, you have to select a letter, wait 10 seconds or more for the Apple TV to find all the videos that begin with that letter, then select the next letter. This form of iterative search, while cool if the device has instant response, means it can take minutes to enter a search query — and, of course, your video won’t be there because it’s most likely not encoded in H.264.
.CALLOUT The company goes so far to make the product easy to use that it’s often a pain to use.
.H1 Limited TV support
If you’ve got a standard definition TV, you know, the kind most people who haven’t bought an HDTV have, don’t bother thinking about the Apple TV. The Apple TV only supports TVs that take in component video or HDMI inputs. In fact, although the Apple TV has been hacked to output in 480i (the format most older TVs use), it’s really meant for 720p or greater.
There’s a paradox here, though. Most of the videos on the iTunes store are provided in relatively low resolution, designed so you can watch Bad News Bears on your iPod. The video quality for most iTunes video on the Apple TV is adequate, but it certainly isn’t HD. It’d probably look better on older TVs, but, well, you know. Not supported.
.H1 Crashing, hanging, and HDMI
The new connectivity buzzword in HDTV is HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface), a cable format that sends both HD video and audio to your TV or your amp (and, incidentally, includes all sorts of DRM to boot). The Apple TV has an HDMI connection, but we discovered it caused the Apple TV to hang or reset itself.
Basically, HDMI talks both ways — it knows if you’ve been bad or good — and if the signal’s been interrupted between the Apple TV and the TV or amp, Apple TV just gets confused or hangs.
Now, why would the signal get interrupted? The answer’s simple: you’re not likely to have just the Apple TV in your entertainment center. At the very least, you’ll have a cable or satellite box, maybe an XBox 360 or PS3, and possibly a DVD player. When you want to watch something other than the Apple TV, you’re switching to another input, thereby interrupting the Apple TV HDMI connection — and the Apple TV gets confused.
When we replaced the HDMI connection (and, yes, we tried different cables) with a component connection, the problems stopped. So, if you get an Apple TV, use component connections.
By the way, our first Apple TV died. It simply refused to acknowledge that there was a network connection, hardwired or wireless. Which brings us to…
.H1 Networking limitations
The Apple TV is a network-centric, high-end media center machine. It’s basically worthless without a network connection. The device has both an Ethernet port as well as a WiFi connection, although the device insists on supporting the wireless connection when you first install it — you have to wait for that connection to fail before you can even begin configuring the thing.
And this is where it gets infuriating. Apple TV makes the assumption that users have no knowledge of networking, so when it comes time to configure the networking capability, the task is just a royal pain. If you need to enter a custom IP address or gateway, or even netmask, you have to fiddle it in with the remote. And, if you fiddled in even one digit wrong, you have to re-enter the entire thing — the entire IP address, gateway, netmask, and DNS server — from scratch.
Do that five or six times and you’ll see why we’re annoyed.
The other gotcha is there are absolutely no informative diagnostics (there’s a self-diagnose button, but other than having the Apple TV tell you everything works when you know it doesn’t, it’s worthless), and we’ve yet to be able to find a technician mode for this thing. We’ve got two PCs set up as iTunes hosts. The Apple TV happily syncs with one of those, containing most of the music files and some video files downloaded from iTunes. However, if we even launch iTunes on the second PC, which is the streaming copy of iTunes, the Apple TV from there on out refuses to recognize the original iTunes. Period.
And there’s no mode, diagnostics, or system to help figure out why. Apple support’s recommendation: reinstall the Apple TV, clear the drive, resync everything, and start over. Each time. Helpful.
.H1 Should you buy this?
We haven’t discussed implementation of photo slideshows because, honestly, we haven’t tried that out. But, like many other media centers, Apple TV lets you play slideshows of pictures downloaded from either iPhoto or Adobe Album.
The question is, should you buy this? At $300 it’s a relatively expensive single-purpose box. When the Apple TV is working smoothly, it’s a joy. When it’s not, it’s an Apple.
There’s a lot this device can do, including easily playing video and audio podcasts. But the company goes so far to make the product easy to use that it’s often a pain to use.
If you really want a tightly integrated connection between your iTunes library and your TV, and if you’ve got an HDTV, and if you don’t mind relatively low-resolution video, and if you don’t mind fighting with it to get it to work "just so", then we wholeheartedly recommend it.
On the other hand, the XBox 360 does substantially the same video and audio streaming to TV (although not from iTunes) for about a hundred bucks more — and you get to play games. The Wii plays all YouTube videos and lets you surf the net — for about $50 less — and you get to play games.
Bottom line: if you’re a die-hard Apple fanatic, love iTunes, and want to connect it all up, go ahead and get an Apple TV. But if you’re just thinking about playing some video or tunes, look elsewhere.
.RATING 3
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.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn more about the [[http://www.apple.com/appletv/|Apple TV]].
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