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Dec 30, 09 - 03:17 pm Comment from: Ting

Wouldn't it be great if the TV turns out to be the gadget of the decade for the 2010s...

Dec 30, 09 - 03:18 pm Comment from: Lava_Head_UK

We I wouldn't be without my ones I think it's brilliant for my needs.

Its day is coming.

I love my apple tv's (yes I have two) I just wish apple would pay it a bit more attention and add iplayer support and hulu for the Americans this isn't a big ask and iplayer shouldn't effect apples bottom line. In the future blu ray intergration across the entire apple range would be nice too, but here's to wishful thinking.

Dec 30, 09 - 03:34 pm Comment from: iQuack

Hey guys, I am with ya. Mom loves hers and I do as well. Wonderful this  TV really is. Does rentals and HD that looks great on the 40 inch screen. To Apple I say, Bravo!

That guy is right... Apple TV is doomed as it is today.
The problem is the set top box approach. It is too cumbersome for the benefits it brings.
I do not see myself buy an Apple TV in its current format.
However, I can see myself buy a TV set with cool extra features.
Therefore, to be hit, Apple TV should become a TV set.

Dec 30, 09 - 03:51 pm Comment from: G4Dualie

I received a 100 dollar gift card for XMas which will help buy my TV.

Will all my AVI / Mov / MP4 files have to be converted before they'll play over the TV?

Dec 30, 09 - 03:54 pm Comment from: Mr. Reeee

@Kitch

Mac mini.

I have never seen the point of the AppleTV. If I'm going to connect a computerized media device, other than the cable box, to my tv I want it to act like a computer. So if I want to stream my media library I will hook up my laptop and turn my tv into a giant computer monitor. Video, photos, music, games, internet, etc, all on my tv.

So please tell me why I would by something that can only play iTunes/iLife stuff and Youtube, and only in 720p, not 1080p. And even at $250, for a one purpose device it seems like a waste to me.

So please, someone enlighten me.

Dec 30, 09 - 04:00 pm Comment from: Brilliant Sandwich

I have an AppleTV and it is great! I'd love to buy a second unit for other rooms in my home, but not in it's current form. I think we will see why Hulu and other free streaming sites have not been allowed on the AppleTV in just a few weeks. Apple and Steve have bigger plans.

Dec 30, 09 - 04:01 pm Comment from: G4Dualie

Rev. Dr.

You don't need an TV and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Dec 30, 09 - 04:02 pm Comment from: HMCIV

@Ting

A decade from now is waaaaay to far away for my attention span. Apple should make Apple TV software available for Kindle.

Dec 30, 09 - 04:04 pm Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

For the present I'm highly satisfied with my Roku box streaming Netflix and all the new additions such as Pandora and Revision3, plus DVDs or Blu-ray discs. It makes for a very economical setup.

Now, if Apple comes up with a subscription plan ...

Dec 30, 09 - 04:05 pm Comment from: G4Dualie

@Sandwich

I agree. Streaming will be huge for Apple for the next decade.

I hoping I can store the things I buy from iTunes Store on Mobile Me and have it streamed everywhere I go, to any device in my arsenal.

Just add ATVFlash by Fire Core & it makes the Apple TV way better! 

I bought my tv when it first came out. Use it more often than watching cable TV. An Apple "flop" as compared to their other offerings, would be considered a wild success by most other companies. The tv will continue to grow in popularity as more content is made available. Most specifically, when people can use it to replace their bloated cable service with a more a la cart oriented iTunes service, including a more liberal movie rental time limitation.

I believe Apple is embarking down a path that will see it become one of the largest digital media distribution companies in the world. I believe a lot will be announced regarding digital media during the scheduled event at the end of January.

We love our Apple TV! but I did not find fault with the article, especially the last sentence

"And with a few tweaks to the product, Apple could easily resurrect this one for the 10s."

also the links for ATV are pretty based articles
http://www.fastcompany.com/tag/apple-tv

Silly article.
As stated, Apple TV is still being sold, so how did it not survive?
Apple repeatedly states that the thing is a hobby but 'journalists' still have to declare it a failure.
In any case, the decade we are leaving was best named the 'Naughties' by one J. Clarkson I believe.
Now, what to name the next decade?

@G4Dualie

apple tv will handle your mp4 files but not avi or mov(not to sure on that one) but if you download handbrake (it's free) this will convert them for you. I would sugest that the iPod legacy setting as this will allow you to play your files back on any of apples portable devices aswell without degrading the picture quality on television too much, hope this helps

I have two Apple TVs but I see why people dont feel as if they need one. Need no, good to have, yes.

Dec 30, 09 - 04:16 pm Comment from: Jimithy

I love my AppleTV, but I'm finding fewer and fewer uses for it as time goes on. I think the only thing I'm currently using it for is renting movies and watching podcasts. All of its other functions I can already do with other devices connected to my TV. AppleTV needs some new features to really make it worthwhile to use. For instance, add Netflix Instant Watch. I currently use my XBOX 360 for this, but I'd much rather use my AppleTV.

@ Dr. Rev.:

If you can't find utility in a device, then it wasn't made for you, now was it? If your current solution works for you, that's great! The tv is a solution to a problem you don't have; you obviously do not need one.

But say for a moment, you don't have a laptop. You have a desktop computer. And say that computer is not sitting in the same room as your TV. Furthermore, you have several computers scattered around the house. Now I ask you, how would go about getting iTunes content from each of those computers to the TV in the living room? And not just some of the content, but access to entire iTunes libraries from every computer all at the same time?

...My roommate and I both have computers in our bedrooms that hold our iTunes libraries and are located on the opposite end of the apartment from the living room. Before the tv, we were limited to watching iTunes content in our rooms. With the AppleTV we can both access our libraries on our computers in our bedrooms from the TV in the living room. It makes perfect sense for us and we both use the tv a lot.

You must be doing something right as a company when you have a viable well-designed steadyselling product, and in comparison to all your other products, it's considered a flop.

speaking of gaffes, thank you for providing sales figures for Kindle through 2010, which is still days away.

any other advance investment knowledge you can provide would also be helpful.

@Dualie

You da Man!

@Michael

"The tv is a solution to a problem you don't have..."

I can't see what problem it is that it solves so well.
I can see what you're saying about computers all over the house, but even then it just seems like some kind of network hub and not a real multi media device (let's not forget that the internet is full of, and is its self, media). Replace the Apple TV with a MacMini (yes I know it's more than twice the price) and you can do the same thing and have more than a "dumb pipe" for iTunes/iLife media. Honestly, my first internet experience was WebTV, and that still seems more useful.

TV+1920x1080p+Internet+iTunes/iLife+BluRay(would be nice)= true multi media experience.

I had an Apple TV (emphasis on had) and I hated the damn thing. Even though I had hacked it with a Patchstick to add Perian codecs and other functionality, it quite frankly is pathetically underpowered. it's fine for SD content, and 720p content "if" it has been compressed and optimized for playback on an ATV. If it hasn't been... it chokes and chokes hard. Forget 1080p. It's a fine device for people who will be satisfied with being tied into the Apple ecosystem, and there's nothing wrong with that, but if you want more out of it, don't get your hopes up.

Even after going to the hassle (ATVUSB-creator) or expense (ATVflash) of hacking it to make it useful (Boxee) its still underpowered clunky. If my PS3 and PS3 media server (software for mac) cant answer my movie needs (bluray rips), then I do occasionally resort to the ATV. But it has essentially become an expensive and low capacity NAS, for me.

"It is too cumbersome for the benefits it brings."
AppleTV may be a lot of things, but I wouldn't call it cumbersome. In five minutes, I can have it hooked up to a tv and streaming content from an iTunes library.

If you're using it the way it was intended, it's not cumbersome. If you're using for an unintended purpose, it cam be VERY cumbersome. Then again, using a Hammer as a Spoon is cumbersome as well.

@Rev. Dr.
"Replace the Apple TV with a MacMini (yes I know it's more than twice the price)..."
Congratulations! You have, on your own, figured out "what problem it solves so well". It solves the "needing-to-have-twice-as-much-money" problem.

Dec 30, 09 - 05:47 pm Comment from: Ting

@HMCIV

Ok, just for you:

Wouldn't it be great if the TV turns out to be the gadget of the YEAR for 2010...

There. Fixed!

Dec 30, 09 - 06:00 pm Comment from: Panolo

Love my Apple TV and I am getting ready to pair it with a Mac Mini.

The MDN Take about 6.6mio TVs being sold is a complete red herring. Every year, easily that many exercise bikes and cross trainers are bought, but a few months later most of them are sitting there, barely used and gathering dust - just like an TV. The Mac Mini is a far better solution to most people's needs, even if it is more expensive.

Dec 30, 09 - 06:39 pm Comment from: wiredzen

While I don't want to deify Steve Jobs, my theory regarding  TV is this: Jobs, as usual, had a premonition of the sooner-than-expected collapse of network TV to go along with his vision for movies and music online. His declaration of the  TV as a hobby was simply a veil, hiding the fact that the company was biding its time until the networks would be forced to negotiate. Now that time is near. A stripped-down version of  TV was put on the market as a tease; the full-blown version will be coming in the not-so-far future, once the networks have been brought to their knees. Again, I don't want to declare sainthood for Jobs, but there is no question he is one of the most important visionaries throughout the history of relative technology. IMHO it is naive to believe that he just absent-mindedly released a project without a holistic vision of the future.

@mac

You mention ATVUSB-creator which in my view is very easy to use to get Boxee. But, the ATV USB-creator can also install XBMC. I'm suprised no one has mentioned running XBMC on the Apple TV. XBMC (xbmc.org) can be executed from within the standard Apple interface. XBMC in my view is a world-class Media Center software that beats the pants off of Windows Media Center or Apple's Front Row or std. Apple TV interface. XBMC on the Apple TV can handle almost any video format out there (xvid/divx,avi,mpeg 4, mpeg 2, etc, etc.). It has a number of gorgeous skins that you can run on it. Although, at the moment XBMC on the Apple TV is not capable of playing back full-blown 1080p blu-ray rips/video files, it can handle 480p dvd rips and some 720p video files (depending on bitrate/profile) just fine.

Work is quickly progressing on drivers/libraries to allow installation of the Broadcom BCM970012 Crystalhd pci-e card in replacement of Apple TV's wifi board (http://rufn.it/aTV/) and enable to the capability of playback of 1080p high def content listed below when combined with the XBMC software (of course)

The following HD file formats are supported by the Broadcom chip:
The chipset is a single-stream HD AVC/VC-1/MPEG-2 decoder solution capable of full HD real-time decoding. The high performance and low power consumption of the solution allow reduced CPU utilization and support for mobile platform designs.

The chipset fully supports the MPEG-2 standard so that compatibility with existing media (DVD) can be maintained. The chipset supports any compliant resolution from QVGA up to 1920 x 1088.

Multistandard high definition video decoding in the following formats:
H.264/AVC HP at L 4.1 1080i, 40 Mbps
H.264/AVC HP at L 3.0 480i
H.264/AVC HP at L 3.2 720p
SMPTE VC-1 AP at L 3 1080i, 40 Mbps
WMV9 (VC-1 SP and MP)
MPEG-2 MP @ ML and MP @ HL
720p, 1080i and 1080p support

The Apple TV has proved to be a fairly hackable device. I encourage everyone to check out XBMC on the Apple TV.

Yesterday hairy instructed his wife on how to use it to listen to her music (loaded on the AppleTV) with the remote, and lo and behold she had it working next day listening to her newly acquired Underwood CD. If she could do this, anybody could.
Yesterday I turned on YouTube and got the most popular downloads (riots from Tehran). But, to search one must click on each letter, same as on a Touch or iPhone, and this is not useful. Much better would be to use Apple's wireless keyboard to do the same thing, type in with all ten fingers. So, if Apple is listening, what would it take to modify the software to allow this modification to the interface? If only. Or even better, the new tablet touch keyboard ought to interface with the Apple TV. Why not?

Dec 30, 09 - 08:56 pm Comment from: John E

ATV needs a new chip and a Leopard-based OS. then it could run apps and serve as the TV extender not just for you Macs, but also your iPhone/touch/Tablet. imagine iPhone games on your big screen TV! it would be sensational.

Uh - yeah - Apple TV rules. You can tell by it's dominating market share.

Rock on Apple TV users. You guys are cool.

Dec 30, 09 - 09:36 pm Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

"imagine iPhone games on your big screen TV!"

If only my 47" LCD had an accelerometer.

'Steves Job' does not know what red herring means but he thinks knows so much he can comment on how many tv units are used and how many go unused.

"You can tell by it's dominating market share."
It has 100% of the purchased iTunes video TV playback market... Excellent point!!

When Apple launched the iPod Jobs did one of his appearances on CNBC and said Apple was intoducing other products to lessen their dependence on Mac HW sales.
The CNBC moron after Jobs denied & detailed the iPod said"is that all"?
I saw it live.

iPhone and iPod touch already interface with Apple Tv- with Apple's free Remote app, you can control it and use the keyboard to type searches. It works beautifully. So the tablet will probably use the Remote app as well.

@Nobama (or should that be Nobrain?). A red herring is defined as "something intended to divert attention from the real problem or matter at hand; a misleading clue". MDN, in its sycophantic defence of all things Mac, offers sales of 6.6 mio as "a misleading clue" to suggest that all is well with Apple TV. A further red herring is to suggest that Apple TV (a data to TV streaming device) is outselling Kindle (a book reader). Wow! I also hear that the Ab King Pro outsells the Juice-o-matic, but once again these things tend to sit idle after the initial novelty wears off.

Go to any Apple retailer and ask them to tell you about the Apple TV. 9 times out of 10 they will steer you towards a Mac Mini with a wireless keyboard as a home media server, not because it is more expensive, but because it will do a whole lot more for you than Apple TV and the remote app.

At the end of the day, I might think that I know a thing or two, but you, Nobraina, seem know about nothing other than being a troll.

Dec 31, 09 - 03:30 am Comment from: disposableidentity

My guess is Apple has sold boxcars full of AppleTVs. They just don't want anyone to know about it. Apple is creating a huge head-start by downplaying the sales. Calling the AplleTV a hobby is smoke & mirrors. One day soon they'llr elease a seriously upgradeed version, push the upgrade out to the existing units and announce an installed base so great the networks can't ignore it. They will have grabbed the whole market on the down-low.

Funny that so many posters are requesting support hulu and other video streaming services.

First off: you can have all this and more on a Mac Mini, possibly augmented with an EyeTV, Terratec, etc.

But the real impediment to the TV taking off in most countries other than the US, is that there is no video content on offer. None at all. Until that changes, how can the TV become the device of the '10s?

I realize that a big obstacle in areas such as Europe is the fragmentation of the author's/performer's rights collecting agencies (whose practices are sometimes questionable). Hopefully there will soon be European directives to clean up this landscape, making it easier for  to negociate agreements.

Dec 31, 09 - 09:54 am Comment from: -hh

The real problem that Fast Company had with this article is very simple:

--> They needed to have something "Apple" to have as click-bait.

Its fair to say that within Apple, the ATV is about the only product that Apple has that hasn't been a home run or line drive double. As such, it was a mere single, which by comparison is a weak showing.

The fact that other companies have had strike-outs ... and the Kindle is a "Player's Choice" (kindle gets to first base by sacrificing book sales) ... is irrelevant: it still comes back to the fact that FastCompany needed to have something hit the news with "Apple" in it for clickbait to give them hits for advertising.


-hh

You have to consider AppleTV is already 3 years old and is more then ripe for an upgrade now. My guess is, Apple waitet so long, because they want to move AppleTV to their ARM based iPhonesOS plattform.

There will be much more to share between appleTV and the new tablet device beside a ARM SOS with much more grafik power and the same main resolution of 1280 x 720. Every piece of software including games and internet could appear on your television soon and the tablet would be the perfect wireless remote control.

So expect Apple tv will grow up soon and leave the hobby status behind. But most people and analysts who are laughing about this device right now are so blind so they need at least 50 Mio units sold to recognize the huge potential.

Apple TV is profitable. I'm sure Apple never lost a penny selling an Apple TV and it has allowed Apple to rent more movies. The biggest issue with Apple TV is lack of content.

How long before Microsoft made a profit on Xbox? Despite its sales, if Xbox was made by a company without such deep pockets, it would have been a huge failure.

@ Dr. Rev: "I can see what you're saying about computers all over the house, but even then it just seems like some kind of network hub and not a real multi media device (let's not forget that the internet is full of, and is its self, media). Replace the Apple TV with a MacMini (yes I know it's more than twice the price) and you can do the same thing and have more than a "dumb pipe" for iTunes/iLife media. Honestly, my first internet experience was WebTV, and that still seems more useful."

First of all... Apple never claimed it to be a "real" multi-media device... That's wishful thinking on your part, so you can't fault the device or Apple for that. All Apple ever claimed was that it was a simpler (wireless) way to view iTunes content on your TV in your living room. That's it.

Second it is not a networking hub, it is nothing more than just another device on the network. It doesn't "network" computers together, it uses the network to access remote iTunes libraries. It allows you to synch with one library and stream content from up to five other libraries and it doesn't matter if the content is protected or not.

Like I said in my previous post, my roommate and I have our own computers and our own iTunes account we buy content with. The AppleTV makes it seamless for us to watch any and all content from either library without needing to authorize each time. So if he's not around, I can still access his library and not have to know his password. You cannot do that on a Mac mini; you can only be logged into one iTunes account at a time and as such, can only view protected content from that single account.

Furthermore, if a friend comes over and brings his laptop and has a movie or a few tv shows in his library he wants to watch, he can easily access that content from the AppleTV and watch it on the big TV.

Again, and this seems to be falling short of your ability to comprehend, it obviously is a solution to a problem you do not have, so why do you insist on complaining about features it doesn't have and wasn't meant to have? It's like looking at a new sedan and bitching about how useless it is because it doesn't have a kitchen sink or a bed, since your last vehicle, an RV, did.

@<dick>Michael</dick>

Wow!

1: "First of all... Apple never claimed it to be a "real" multi-media device... That's wishful thinking on your part, so you can't fault the device or Apple for that".

Ok, so skipping to the end and ignoring the dickley comment about wishful thinking, I never faulted the device or Apple, I just don't see the use for it.

2: "Second it is not a networking hub, it is nothing more than just another device on the network. ...It allows you to synch with one library and stream content from up to five other libraries"

Sounds like a network hub to me, a very limited one, granted, but a network hub nonetheless. Just saying.

3: "so why do you insist on complaining about features it doesn't have and wasn't meant to have?"

I'm not complaining. Why should I complain? I don't own one, so I have nothing to complain about. I just want to know if there is something about this device that I don't know about that that makes it cooler than what I do know about it. And if Apple want to sell as something to go with an HDTV, then 1920x1080p support is something that it is "meant" to have. Can you comprehend that. If you can't maybe you should ask your Mom to explain it to you, and stop referring to her as your "roommate", it's just creepy.

Dec 31, 09 - 09:02 pm Comment from: DogGone

The MacMini is the obvious alternative if you need a more fleshed out unit. I have mine hooked up to the HDTV and a monitor. Both are at 1920x1080, are powered at the same time. I used monoprice's adaptor that combines display port and usb to hdmi. Works perfect for the HDTV. The other port uses an DVI-D adaptor for the monitor.

The biggest problem with the mini is that it is 3x the price of the AppleTV. Also adding additional hard drives, buying a monitor, keyboard, mouse etc will raise the cost higher.

Jan 02, 10 - 04:01 am Comment from: John V. Keogh

They are wrong - my Apple TV continues to amaze me with its Flickr, YouTube and music.

Also it's noughties, not aughties.