Apple TV

I hate to say it, but the new Apple TV device announced yesterday (and shipping in Australia next month, unlike the iPhone, which was on every news bulletin yesterday but won’t ship in Australia until 2008) seems a bit of a novelty item.

It seems that the Apple TV will only play things from iTunes, and in Australia, that means music, and music videos. In the US, you can buy TV shows and Movies, but here, with the huge cost of bandwidth, it’s just not feasible to sell them (quite apart from the copyright issues). Oh, and it only has a 40GB hard drive. I think I’ll wait and see what the Apple TV 2 has going for it.

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4 Comments

  1. I must agree i was pretty underwhelmed by it…
    The RRP is going to be something like $550 when for a little more you could buy a full Linux box running MythTv which could record tv and stream the lot (a la the Thoms household).

  2. Since posting, I realised that it does let you store your home movies on it (just not DVDs).

    Given that it’s called Apple TV, I thought it would at least be able to interact with traditional TV… but perhaps they’re looking forward to the future: beyond broadcasting, to narrowcasting. And with no DVD drive, I guess they’re just trying to keep the copyright holders happy that they’re not facilitating piracy.

    With the 40GB HD, I think it’s only going to be a temporary store for things that you’re keeping on another computer (or ipod): the real repository of home media is bound to be something with a bigger drive.

  3. Even for those of us who can take advantage of the iTunes TV features, it’s hard to imagine that the Apple TV box could be THAT much better than the $20 plug I bought to connect the MacBook to the TV!

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