So, lots has been said about Apple TV that I won't repeat. What I will say is that it's very interesting that Apple decided to add a hdd to the unit and make it primarily about syncing instead of streaming.
By "primarily", I mean it's the model they put the most work into and really made work well. Streaming feels kind of wonky in ways they could easily have fixed. For example:
- You must be logged into you pc and running itunes to do it.
- Since itunes only runs for one user at a time on the computer, if my wife wants to listen to music on the pc while I listen in the living room, one of us is SOL.
- What if my wife and I both have music libraries? How do I listen to music without running back to my den to swap accounts?
The obvious fix would be a Windows "service" that runs 24/7 in the background, and that aggregates selected users' music into a single stream. But Apple didn't go that way.
Instead, they've made Apple TV into truly an iPod for your tv. If you've got under 40GB of content, this makes a lot of sense. Your network can be unreliable, you don't need your pc running 24/7 to access music, etc. The user model is also very familiar - users who are used to syncing to an iPod already know how to set up and use their Apple TV. I love their guts in making this decision. There are big drawbacks for those of us with (ahem) much larger collections, but that's a tiny % of the overall audience, and HDDs will grow over time.
Of course, it then begs me to ask the next question - how is an Apple TV really better than an iPod dock? You sync to your iPod, then bring the ipod into the living room and boot up and watch/listen. I mean, Apple TV is prettier and syncs wirelessly, but is that worth $300?
Adding codecs to Apple TV. Folks have figured out how to hack the apple TV to support divx, etc. This is a nice technical demo, but in fact it's not very meaningful unless they figure out how to get iTunes to support those codecs. Without that, it's very tough to get content onto the TV to watch it.
