Monday, February 18, 2008

AppleTV Goodness


"Your TV will love you for it"
That is Apple's marketing tag line for the. AppleTV .
After much wrangling and returning Christmas gifts for store credit (no it wasn't your gift I returned) I was finally able to pick up my long awaited AppleTV this past Friday.
I don't know about my TV but I absolutely love this piece of equipment. I think Apple has just hit another home run. I'm gonna place this gadget right square in the middle of the place my first DVR captured. The "I can't live without this" space. It's really that good.
For years now most of my family's music and photo libraries have existed on our computer in our office. A year ago I wrangled an Apple AirTunes device and was able to start listening to my music library on my main home theatre system without burning CD's etc. Problem there was I had to control the music from the computer and not from my theatre system. It was a pain. There really wasn't an easy way to view any of our family pics on our home theatre system unless I took the significant time hit to create a slideshow DVD. I never did it.
Now, I can control my full music library from my couch and I can view any of my photos from there as well. It is the photo feature that sold the wife as she over and over for the last few weeks was saying she didn't get why I wanted an Apple TV. Within 24 hours she was hooked and would get the device just for the photo feature. This isn't even the cool part!
Last week due to some miscommunication we missed the latest episode of Survivor on TV. We didn't have it scheduled on our DVR. What to do? Enter Apple TV. Literally within minutes of hooking up the unit I had purchased the missed episode and we were watching it as a family. On our TV. Nice. Fast forward 24 hours. Saturday night and we hadn't gotten out to Hollywood video. No problem. I flipped the AppleTV on and within minutes we were ready to watch a movie we had chosen to rent for the evening. No driving. No standing in the video store looking at the empty shelves wishing we had come earlier. No returning the video days later after forgetting about it. $2.99. Done. Beautiful. The AppleTV performed flawless. We watched the movie and then turned off the TV.
I can't imagine why everyone wouldn't want one of these things. That's where I get sad. I know there are many people out there including some of my dearest friends and co-workers that have an 'anything Apple must not be good' issue. I really feel sorry for them. They are missing out and most likely will miss out on this opportunity unless it catches on like the iPod. These same friends will sit and fiddle with their Windows Media Center PC boxes trying desperately to get the same functionality that I have and they will never quite get there. And, the kicker is that I know the AppleTV will continue to get better and better. It already rocks! What else could they possibly do? And I haven't even used all the features yet!
So, that is my review and my testimony and my soap box.

1 Comments:

At 10:51 PM , Blogger R. Jeffrey Davis said...

I KNEW I should have stopped by your house tonight instead of coming home and jumping on the treadmill. Oh well, another night!

 

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