I installed an AppleTV yesterday and I thought I'd share some of my initial impressions.
The design of the AppleTV is very much like that of a MacMini, with the same footprint, but about half the height (no DVD/CD-ROM on the TV). It's small and quiet, but it does get hot. I hooked it into my 1080i HD TV via a connection from the HDMI port on the AppleTV to the DVI port on the TV. I used a DVI cable to do this with an HDMI/DVI adapter. Since the DVI (unlike HDMI) doesn't do audio, a simple audio patch cord was needed for the audio. Your other choices are component video and audio and/or optical audio.
The system disk is 40GB, and after system/OS, it has a capacity of just under 33GB to store movies, audio, podcasts, and photos among others. It connects to your home network wirelessly (it has built in 802.11b/g/n and the radio seems pretty good) or 10/100Mb wired Ethernet. If you use g or n wireless network, you have sufficient speed to stream media to/from it.
I have an 1080i HD TV and the AppleTV supports 1080i HD or 480p resolutions (i is for interlaced and p is for progressive). I used it in 1080i mode. The picture was very good and I didn't have to do any of the tweaking that the TV can do.
Once installed with the picture setup, I sync'd it with iTunes on my laptop. You need at least iTunes version 7.1 to do this. I was very happy that when the AppleTV tried to attach itself to my laptop, my laptop's firewall alerted me and told me how to allow it. Once you do that you enter a code from your TV and the AppleTV shows up just like an iPod does in your iTunes.
I thought the interface to iPhoto was really good and it was quite easy to select individual albums/slidesows or "sync" a whole iPhoto library.
The remote is almost the size of an iPod Nano with TV remote like buttons. I found myself trying to "dial" the remote just like I would the click wheel on an iPod (see later).
Boos and hisses:
- The network installation didn't go as well as I think it should have. I route out through another machine rather than my wireless switch/router, so I had to go into the TCP/IP configuration. This involves using a remote control to "dial" the IP address. When I entered one that's a standard Private Internet address, unlike most OSes, it didn't guess the standard (geekspeak -- Class C) netmask, rather it came up 000.000.000.000. Once I put the proper netmask on (255.255.255.0), it didn't guess that the router was on that network. Not a big deal, but even Windows Me does that.
- While the interface clearly makes a distinction between music and podcasts, apparently the slide show does not, so part way through the slideshow, a podcast started playing.
- The index to the songs doesn't take advantage of the screen size with cascading menues.
- With many songs it is a little hard to go from top to bottom (scrolling through each song). Maybe it should have an alphabetical index too. This is also where a click wheel iPod interface would help.
Features for version 2.0
Here's what I'd like to see in version 2.0 of the hardware:
- A coax connection with a tuner and/or place for a CableCARD
- a digital video recorder (DVR)
- a DVD
Obviously, one of Apple's goals is to sell iTunes "Movie" content rather than letting me load a DVD or tune my cable through it with DVR capability. I understand that, but I expected the AppleTV to be much more like a cable box than a sort of an iPod interface for your TV. I really consider version 1.0 of this product iPodTV rather than AppleTV.
My overall grade for the AppleTV version 1.0 would be an "I" for incomplete -- elegant design, but it needs more features.
* The AppleTV package does include the warning that the "TV is not included."
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