Apple TV price slashed, 40GB model dropped
By Thomas Ricker 
posted September 14th 2009 5:38AM
posted September 14th 2009 5:38AM
[Via MacRumors]
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posted September 14th 2009 5:38AM
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Sorry - I should have searched first. I thought this as some sort of hack or user created ad-on ... turns out it's a feature!?
Cooooowell
Completely agree. I have one and love it. I'm not expecting it to be a DVR or anything else, just a way to listen to my music over my Yamaha receiver, and watch/rent films occaisionally.
I used to have an XP Media Centre that was a pain in the ass. I upgraded it to Vista, but it was even more of a pain in the ass then. There seemed to be so much fiddling around just to get stuff where I wanted it when I wanted it.
The beauty of the ATV is that it just fits into the whole iPod/iTunes ecosystem with no faffing. I just don't have the time to mess around with my gadgets anymore. I gladly go for fewer features if it also comes with massively increased ease of use.
Agreed. I have one at home and we really find it convenient. We use it to rent movies fairly often because it's easy to use and the playback interface is much better than our cable company's on-demand service. And we use it to play music over our home stereo system. I do like the local storage space for music because both my girlfriend and I have notebook computers that are not always turned on or in the house.
Totally agree with all you've said, if ATV does what you want, I think it's a great little media box.
I also own both a PS3 and the X360 and they complement each other really well, but since 90% of the time I listen to music, put on a slideshow of photos or listen to a podcast, the iTunes/Flickr integration and the fact that it's completely silent makes it the best option. The iPhone/iTouch remote software makes it a snap to control it from anywhere in the house too.
Let's face it, all these products have flaws. I didn't buy the ATV for movies or MKV files playback. The X360 is noisy, doesn't have Blu-ray nor wireless LAN. The PS3 doesn't have Netflix/Zune marketplace and the interface isn't as good as Xbox NXE.
If any of these products was doing everything perfectly for everybody, we wouldn't have this discussion. ;)
I hear the soon-to-be-released updated model will include a camera, because, you know, it ain't a gaming machine.
Save your money. I have an Apple TV, and there are a lot of problems that they need to get corrected before it is ready for prime time. The biggest problem is downloading straight to the Apple TV. It is horribly slow to put it nicely. My iMac and my ATV are within 15 ft of one another, so I decided to run a test one day. I downloaded the same movie on the iMac and the ATV. The iMac finished in about an hr. The ATV took over 12 hrs. I have Apple Care on my ATV, and even Apple cannot explain to me what the deal is.
GlynC, You can minimise server power usage with macs as they can be set to sleep when not in use and have "wake on network access" turned on. This works great. Also I think Freeview is like our Free to air digital TV in Australia and I use EyeTv on the mac server as the dvr. So I get to record digital tv to my mac and it automatically gets added to itunes and is then available to all the apple tv's. Works a treat.
Apple TV's also make pretty good entry level XBMC machines. TV shows & DVD rips play perfectly they just can't handle HD content too well. But for the cheap price you get a computer with practically 0 noise, a remote, hdmi + optical audio. Perfect for a home theater set up.
Don't forget Boxee
AppleTV is garbage, mine recently crashed and now won't even turn on
taking all of the digital content I purchased with it. So I'm out of
a piece of hardware that I hardly used and paid way too much money
for. I have all that content backed up to my Macbook, so there's
that. But I've pretty much gone from a big believer in digital
content to someone who is going back to purchasing CDs, movies, etc.
Just another example of why I'm rediscovering a love of actually
OWNING physical products because DRM and technology is completely
unreliable and I'm sick of stuff breaking or crashing taking my
content with IT. iTunes doesn't provide a mechanism to recover
your purchased product - beyond their inadequate "report a problem"
thing. I will say, I loved my AppleTV and the idea that I had all of this content on there so whatever mood I was in
I could just watch something without wading through my 2,000 DVD collection.
When I lost my iTunes library last month I was really upset and getting ready to repurchase a lot of stuff when I remembered,
wait a second, I own all of these CDs - they were in storage. It took me hours to rebuild my playlist. I would have lost almost $1,000 worth of purchased iTunes music but it was on my iPod, so I purchased a $30 program to get the music off of it because Apple won't allow me to move music off my iPod for some dumb, unknown reason.
I'm thinking about going back to Windows, I despise Apple and all my Apple products have been pretty much high-classed
junk in the last month. And then there's the fact that I paid a small fortune for my macbook setup and software, so it's hard for me to work happily on my Dell with the Macbook sitting there collecting dust. So I keep coming back to it. But darnit, I do love iMovie and iPhoto. There's no real good photo alternative on Windows. I don't think Live Photo or Picasa is ready for prime time.
I'm quite a recent Mac convert, after living with Windows pretty much all my life, then moving to Linux when everyone in the house had Netbooks... then realising how crap and 'backward' they all were we decided to sell all the Windows machines, all the Netbooks (plus some other stuff) and buy a MacBook Pro.
To be honest, we love it. Very reliable, convenient and easy, plus Garageband, iPhoto and iMovie have opened up new hobbies among us and with iTunes 9, sharing media has become a lot easier (and is better than sharing one centralised or networked library in my opinion).
All backed up to Mozy, just in case, with a 'Carbon Copy' of the hard drive on a USB drive.
Or you could, you know, back stuff up.
(I say this after having to restore my AppleTV to factory defaults over the weekend)
Ironically, the best media player I've found is a patchsticked AppleTV running XBMC.
You can tell it's an obvious troll when someone who claims to have a bunch of Apple gear claims they woke up one morning and started hating it, and then lists off the standard Windows Fanboy gripes ("overpriced classy junk").
Dude, if you had all the gear you claim to have, you'd either love it, or you'd have *specific* complaints about the things you don't like, concrete reasons to switch away.. not general FUD that sounds like it's straight from laptop hunters.
If you had a Nano or hard drive iPod, iDump would have copied off the music for free. The Touch does require that $30 program though I think, iDump has said it won't work with iPhone or the Touch. Too bad, I wish they could get it working.
I also think Media Monkey will copy your music off your iPod and I believe that feature DOES work with the Touch and iPhone.
A lot of PC fanboys here!
I love my Aplple TV and use it all the time. I can't think of not having it. The last thing I want is my big, noisy, clunky XBox 360 to be my media center.
The buy, or wait, better yet, build your own Shuttle PC.
You know, a full-fledged PC that can also double as a Media Center device, instead of just a glorified storage device with routing capabilities.
Or you could get, you know, a Mac Mini. The Mini's awesome - I'm typing this on it now, it's my main PC. Fast enough for pretty much everything, though I'll probably have to buy some quad-core PC next year sometime for compiling. Depending.
i didnt know that they still made these
PC user ignorant about Apple product line. News at Eleven.
After the poor Touch showing at the 9-9-09 Apple event I sold both my 1st gen iphone and Touch and I am getting the Zune HD. Apple is letting MS in the door by not advanceing the Touch.
On behalf of Engadget's entire readership, I'd like to thank you for your insightful comment about the AppleTV and today's price drop.
So.... Because Apple didn't make you happy with their debut's, you're going to get rid of everything you have?
Really? They updated the speed of the touch, and you only use it for games, so I would have thought you would have been happy... Perhaps your Zen broke? Also, when did you get an Iphone? As of June it was not affordable...
From you:
"
Mar 11th 2009 2:18PM
Apple is now mostly useless. With the removal of DRM I have moved just about all my Apple videos to my Creative Zen W sure I have a touch but all I do with that is play games. So what ever Apple releases now means very little. Also with everyone openning an App store (MS, Samsung, and Acer) Soon we will not even need the touch to play games.
Jun 8th 2009 4:27PM
Well I would have to say the "S" in 3GS stands for SCREWED. All the Apple people have to pay $200.00 to get the latest and greatest Iphone. So let's do the math I am a Apple Fanboy I get the first gen for what $600.00 then I drop another $200.00 for 3G and now an additional $200.00 for 3GS wow the cost of being an Apple Fanboy is priceless.....? Not to menetion what you pay for monly service over the past two years..
I am sorry I just can not afford to live beyond my needs to be an Apple guy.
"
heh
My Zen W is fine resting nicely at home. I will send your reguards to it. I want the Zune HD to have some thing smaller and more portable. After all I have and 8.9 netbook a 14 inch tablet and a 17 inch Acer laptop along with 2 different UMPC's Sony and Asus so I like to have several to choose from. As far as my iphone goes it was a gift from my boss who upgraded to a 3gs. And a 1st gen Iphone plan is cheaper then a 3gs plan. For my cell I am using a HTC TOUCH now.
*Yawn*
Wake me up when it has more space, works faster than a regular Apple computer (or any other HTPC), and has a CableCard.
Must haves for any media center type device
Hulu
Netflix
Making room for something new?
Call me a dork, I love my Apple TV. I don't play games, so an Xbox 360 is an investment that would just collect dust.
WHen they add RCA out for those of us who don't have an HD TV yet I'll bite.
I have an Apple TV and love it! I'm psyched that the price drop happened, too!
I was thinking of buying one for a friend, and this makes the decision easy!
TV + XBMC = best non-HD streaming video player. Just add your movie/downloads folders as sources on a copy of XBMC on your computer, turn on UPnP server, and you can unlock those terabytes of, erm... linux ISOs...from Bitorrent. No janky UI, no copying files around the network, no wasted HDD space, just fast & easy streaming of just about any video file (it does music and photos as well, but IMHO, the stock TV does those better). You can even put a folder (and all its subs) on 'random' and create your own Simpsons-ATHF-Morel Orel-Futurama-South Park-Robot Chicken-Tentacle Pron 24/7 TV channel.
I second the XBMC.
VERY Easy to use. Just load the program. Show what video source folder you want to use (whether on that computer or somewhere on the network) and then just hit OK.
When you want to watch a movie, change input on tv to HDMI. Click VIDEOS, then scroll through which one you want to watch.
Music also works the same way, as well as photos. Any computer on the network!
Any old computer 1.3ghz or greater with an HDMI video card will work just fine. Have mine running on a Sempron 3100 Emachine with a Nvideo 7800gs (DVI/HDMI converter) runs FLAWLESS and VERY simple.
Maybe they are just going to dump the whole AppleTV and come up with something else later.
For all the Apple Fanboys who claim I'm a WIndows Fanboy, yes, I'm a proud Windows Fangirl who actually owns almost every line of Apple Products including - Macbook - the high-end with the lighted keys, iPhone, 32-Gig iPod Touch, and AppleTV. So I think I have a right to gripe about how I don't think Apple is as great as everyone thinks it is and yes some of their stuff is JUNK. AppleTV for starters - I loved it and used it regularly for 6 months and then I stopped using it for a few months, did an software update and the thing CRASHED after the update, will not start up. So yeah, I think I have a right to be ticked off. At the same time one of the OSX/iTunes updates crashed my Library when I tried to create a consolidated backup - a process that for some unknown reason Apple makes IRREVERSIBLE! So if something goes wrong during the consolidation process you are basically f'ed which I was.
Apple just assumes everyone using their products are f'ing MORONS and that all of their stuff "JUST" works so they NEVER build in any contingencies for the occasions (rare, though they may be - supposedly) things don't work out for customers. That's why they only have ONE-WAY sync to iPods, don't provide a Digital Locker so people can recover their purchased items, don't let people reverse Consolidation, don't offer an easy system restore option (time machine is stupid) and I can go on and on. This is why I will most likely go back to Windows. Because at least Windows applications assume things will fail and provide some mechanisms for restoring purchased content.
Love my appleTV and have set it up for many clients who use it primarily for playing their music collections in their home theaters.
Combined with the Remote app on an iPod Touch or iPhone it's an awesome in-home music system.
It also makes renting movies from iTunes actually useful.
I rented several before a vacation trip recently, and easily synched them with my iPhone for the flights, then synched the ones I hadn't yet watched back to the AppleTV. All with very littl effort, and all within iTunes.
I remember the early commercials for it described it as "An iPod for your TV".
It works as advertised in my opinion.
I can understand how it will never be as big of a platform as iPod, and it's too bad Apple may not see it as a worthy project because of this. They seem to prefer to do products that appeal to everyone.
I guess I represent the small population of people for whom the AppleTV is an ideal device. Why? Convenience and price.
I think the day when we could start downloading TV shows without having to actually "tune in" was the beginning of paradise. Live television is generally depraved, disgusting, brainwashing garbage...even while tuning in to a good show you have to wade through 20 minutes of crap to see it. I love bypassing live TV and commercials altogether, and the few shows that I actually enjoy I pay for and download through iTunes to do just that. I then own a copy of each episode 24 hours after it's been aired as opposed to on DVD a year later, and the video quality is such now that I never want the DVD when it comes out anyway. Therefore the AppleTV is a lovely product for me, and far more convenient than any live streaming website...
I don't use Hulu because I follow a small number of shows religiously enough that I want to actually own copies for myself, and also because I detest commercials (more on that later). As far as Netflix streaming goes, the sad fact is that from where I sit there just aren't that many movies streaming on Netflix...I'm sure that will change but I would guess that 1 in 20 of the items currently in my queue are actually available to stream. So basically I have absolutely no use for either of these options.
(I also am tired of having to stop watching television because I just received a text message or a phone call on my iPhone, so constantly synching and re-synching video to my phone and using it's TV OUT function with an AV cable is ok for me...but even that is not ideal.)
I love how a common response to AppleTV is, "why not just use a Mac Mini?" or "why not just hook a computer up to your TV?" See, I don't WANT to use a full-fledged operating system on my TV. I don't have kids who need to check their emails on a flat-screen-television. I don't want to play TextTwist on my wall. What I want is a media center for watching video through a streamlined interface made for easy use via a remote, seeing as how the television is on the wall several FEET away from me. Trying to navigate a full OS in 1920x1080 mode can be sort of tricky from across the room. If that still wasn't enough reason to ignore such an idea, assuming that using said small-form-factor PC on a television set would be convenient via a remote (which it really isn't), a very good reason would be that the AppleTV is LESS EXPENSIVE.
You could buy a refurbished 160GB model today for $189, versus either $400-ish for some other product featuring WINDOWS, or a Mac Mini for $600.