Review: Apple TV
- Article 4 of 19
- MacUser, May 2007
Sometimes a product comes to market before the market is really ready. Sometimes a product doesn’t quite have the spec to take the market by storm. The Apple TV is an exciting combination of both, hobbled simultaneously by current technology and limited functionality.
The aim of the Apple TV is to unite your computer and its digital content with your widescreen television set using your home network. Forget any ideas of recording TV or any other kind of video content on an Apple TV: with no TV tuner or video inputs, the Apple TV needs its content to be on your Mac or PC first for it to go anywhere near it.
You set the Apple TV to sync with one Mac or PC. It grabs everything in iTunes and iPhoto (or Photoshop Elements on a PC) that it can and then lets you display it on your TV. You can also stream video and audio content from five other Macs or PCs.
In practice, everything doesn’t work so smoothly. The Apple TV does have a simple, attractive interface, very similar to Front Row’s so any Mac owner with a recent model will already know how to use it. It’s highly responsive, although there are a few kinks to it that take some time to get used to, such as the way the forward and reverse functions work, the way the Apple TV sorts content and displays information about it, and the occasional difficulty getting wireless streaming clients to pair up with it initially.
Music playback is excellent, although photo playback is limited to simple slideshows and you can’t display any movies you might have stored in iPhoto. The Apple TV also produces an excellent picture from video content, when it’s given sufficiently detailed files to work with.
But as mentioned, the Apple TV’s problems are twofold. There are those inflicted by Apple. The ATV’s 33GB hard drive means that the true media junkie will already have lost the easy seamlessness expected of an Apple device in favour of having to choose which of their many files they want to have on their claustrophobic Apple TV.
The poor connection choices – component video and HDMI instead of phono or SCART – chosen by Apple mean that only those with an expensive television set are going to be able to use the Apple TV easily, with everyone else having to resort to adaptor cables, hi-fi systems and/or expensive converter boxes.
The video formats supported by the Apple TV are by no means the most common, with only H.264 and MPEG4 movies of specific resolutions passing the entry requirements. In all likelihood, that means time-consuming conversions of your video content before it can get anywhere near the Apple TV, something the intended audience probably won’t have the skills to do: the fact that iTunes has a conversion system is of no use in a program that won’t manage a video unless it is a QuickTime movie or an MPEG4 already. The lack of a proper automatic labelling system for imported movies, such as that available in Myth TV via IMDB or in iTunes itself via Gracenote for music, also means tiresome manual data entry is now mandatory if you’re to avoid a hunt through a rabbit warren of files.
The problems of networks aren’t Apple’s fault though, but the ambition of the Apple TV means that those problems are an Apple TV owner’s as well. If you don’t mind trailing cables, you can get by with a wired network. Wireless is a different matter. After initially testing the Apple TV with an 802.11n wireless network, something that was more than acceptable and better than Ethernet in practice, we downgraded to 802.11g and instantly regretted it: like syncing an iPod over USB 1.0, it’s just not a good option in practice. Initial syncing over an 802.11g network can take a good few hours, and video streaming just isn’t possible with any reliability or guarantee of quality. If you’re thinking of buying an Apple TV, factor in the cost of an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station as well, because you will need it.
The Apple TV is a beautifully constructed device that’s very easy to use and synchronises more or less seamlessly with iTunes. But Apple’s poor choice of connection options, hard drive and video compatibility means that it requires someone with a deep pocket and not inconsiderable technical skill and time to get it to be more than an expensive photo album and MP3 player.