Top Ten Reasons To Stay Away From the New Apple TV

For quite some time now, a lot of effort has gone into creating products that get the media content stored on your computer's hard drive, and get it onto the television in the living room. With a few exceptions, they have not really succeeded, at least from a mass market perspective. With images, compressed audio, video clips, and internet content all potential candidates for entertainment on that new 50" plasma HDTV with the surround sound system, it's just a matter before some company "gets it right."

This week Apple introduced their long anticipated Apple TV product. Before you rush to give Steve Jobs some hard earned dough, let's take a look why I'm not all that impressed.

1. First of all is the price. At $299 this is not an impulse buy, this is a more serious electronics purchase. For three Franklins this better be something really great. With households buying new flat panel TV's for the next year or two, and replacing their VCR's as the analog signal goes away, I'm not sure they'll want to devote this much money to the Apple TV.
2. Maybe it's just me, but there is no more functionality in this Apple TV than in a dock for your iPod. Sure the idea of wireless transfer of content is way cool, but you're simply getting access to the music, pictures and videos from your iTunes account. Like I said, a decent docking station will get you that.
3. I was rather disappointed to hear that the hard drive capacity is a mere 40 gigs. Seriously, I've thrown out drives that held more. The largest iPod is 80 gigs. What's a serious user to do? On top of that, consider that this Apple TV is really designed for television use, which means video, and more capacity becomes a necessity. In this era of super large hard drives that hold 750 GB for a desktop, and 160 GB for a notebook drive, I just don't get the small size. It should have held at least 100 gigs, and the cost difference should be minimal. Is this planned obsolescence holding something back for Apple TV 2.0?
4. While I think it is great that the output is 720p, the problem is that this limits the output as well. The Apple TV has to be hooked up to an HDTV. This excludes the majority of TV set owners out there, at least for the time being. The movies or TV shows downloaded from the iTunes store are formatted for a video iPod so we're hardly talking hi def there so there must be some serious upconversion going on or the picture is really gonna be subpar.
   
5. The Apple TV, like so many electronics today, doesn't even include the cables to connect it to the TV. They are an "accessory." Seriously, while this is common practice among printer companies, this should not be. For a pricey piece of electronics, it should come with the cable in the box, and consumers should demand nothing less.
6. The only content that can come live from the internet are movie trailers. I'm presuming that it's restricted to the ones in the Quicktime format directly from the Apple. While YouTube and company would a killer app, there's no chance of that happening here.
7. The Apple TV presumes to conform to both the WiFi G and N standards. Maybe I'm nitpicking here, but the official N standard hasn't even been finalized yet, so this is more like G Plus networking gear as far as I'm concerned.
8. The music played is restricted to the iTunes formats. That means that WMA's and OGG files have no chance of being streamed through this. While this may benefit the iTunes store, there's no reason other than greed to lock out these other popular formats. Also, there's no support for streaming internet radio.
   
9. There are no other supported video formats. Windows Media and Divx would be obvious choices.
10. While there is a USB interface on the rear, external storage is not supported. Too bad, a nice fat hard drive could really fix the limited 40 gig internal drive. I'm not sure why this would be. Oh wait, maybe they'll release an iExternal Drive which comes in a white case which has another 40 gigs for a mere $200.

All right, there you have it. To me, it seems like the Apple TV is a beta product, and the final one will be released next year. Sure, for a basic user who only wants to get their iTunes content to their living room, it will get the job done in simple Apple fashion (although a dock would be cheaper and work with more TV's). However, most power users would be better off building a home theater pc. Then they can avoid all of these restrictions and enjoy their content, all of it, without these iRestrictions.

--Jonas