Apple TV, my personal review

By now, you have probably heard of the Apple TV, a device that is essentially a fancy-pants iPod for your TV.  Allowing you to take your media that is in your iTunes and have it play on or through your TV.

iWanted one when it first came out, but I couldn't bring myself to buy it.  Couldn't justify it.  Hard drive was too small, price point too high.

Then Apple came out with a second version, with way more harddrive space, (160 G's) but the price point was too high for the features that you get.  (You still had to buy movies on your iTunes on your computer, then transfer them over to the AppleTV when it got done downloading.)

Then Steve Jobs came out with the "AppleTV: Take two".  They lowered the price point, and made the ability to rent movies directly from my couch possible.  Excellent.  This is exactly what I was waiting for.  So, being such that it was my birthday, I went down to the local Apple Store and bought one.  The bigger one that was 329.00.  

Brought it home, plugged it in, of course, mine was on the old software revision, so it had to update first, which, after joining it to my Wireless Network, it downloaded the update and updated itself.  (802.11n, so the download was fast.)

Next, my computer that holds all my movies and music (I started ripping my movies from DVD onto my computer using Handbrake a long time ago :) auto-detected the AppleTV, asked me if I wanted to set it up (of course I did!), and it transferred all the media over.  Now, I have about 140 Gigs of media, so I set it to transfer and went to bed.  It was late at night anyway.

When I woke up, everything was synced, and I was good to go with my photos, music, and movies.  (Even though I could have streamed them directly from my machine(s)).  I've rented and watched a few movies.  It's been great.

Overall, I like it.  If you have taken the time to convert all your media (CD's, Movies, etc) into digital format and into iTunes, (or would) I highly recommend the AppleTV.  There is nothing like having your entire movie library, music library, and all of your photos at your fingertips able to be watched and loaded at the touch of a button.  Of course, along with the ability to rent movies, this is priceless.

Stamp?  Recommended.

 Subscribe in a reader