pcmag.com — By delivering a well-designed, easy-to-use solution, Apple will be the one that finally gets customers to understand what it means to move their content around the house. And, perhaps in the way that the Apple iPod redefined MP3 players, Apple TV will become the product that redefines the PC-to-TV digital media experience
Feb 23, 2007 View in Crawl 4
nycdigginitFeb 23, 2007
Don't you get it... $299 is the price point for impulse purchases. Of course this is the price. Everything is $299 these days. An iPod, the Razor phone started at that price and now this new toy.... this price point is pervasive... even designer sun glasses. Gone is $29.95 for junk you buy on TV. This is the new age of on-line spending impulsively.
leonbevFeb 24, 2007
$299 for a wireless media extender wouldn't be that bad if the downloadable content for it was cheap. You're basically locked into iTunes for your media content, however, and the video choices on iTunes are expensive and quite limited when you compare them to broadcast television or NetFlix.
goosnarghFeb 24, 2007
They do... e.g Lost.S03E09.720p.HDTV.x264-CTUWhy are you talking about video being portable? Last time I checked a TV + Apple TV wouldn't be portable. Chances are you'd be transcoding videos for portable players anyway (since they have limited resolution & H.264 profile support).
mabhatterFeb 25, 2007
the killer app is TV shows. Right now, a good number of network shows are available onLine for free. My wife works nites sometimes and likes to watch the shows she misses. It's NOT bittorrent... it's all approved and legal!! That should be the target for [Apple]TV. Get those shows on to people's TVs and they'll eat it up. Apple could gain bonus points by allowing Zip code for content targeting in the setup.. at worst, they could even enable some kind of flag to prevent ad skipping. I wouldn't LIKE them to do that, but it would get lots of free content on the box... that would make it sell. They NEED a way to access Flash 9 content if they don't already... being as I don't like installing the spyware of the day codex packs, I find Flash video to be an acceptable balance. Not that something truely free wouldn't work too. But you have to be able to sign on to video podcasts and they have to be "no strings" for the producers.. perhaps exchange ads for hosting on Apple's part?
mabhatterFeb 25, 2007
bingo!IF they can get the streamed TV shows from ABC, CW, FOX, etc that they already show for free online my wife will be first in line.
mabhatterFeb 25, 2007
they should leave games to Wii!!!Of course I'd like to see an Apple/Nintendo partnership anyway... iTunes on DS would be really cool as well as iTunes on Wii. Wii doesn't have the guts for HD so it's no competition to Apple... but it has wireless and uses memory cards....
deadlockMar 1, 2007
I'll tell you what's wrong with using the XBox 360 as a media extender, the one small, fundamental flaw, the fly in the ointment, the minor oversight that became the universal show-stopper: you can't pick up where you left off. How stupid and retarded is that? Didn't it ever occur to anyone in Microsoft that people might not want or be able to watch a whole movie in one go? Of course, it doesn't help that there's no system for 'scrubbing' through a video either - you have to use the fast-forward functions. I thought we left that crap behind when we adopted DVD. My *ipod* has a more elegant interface for video playback from that point of view.