Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Introduces Updated Apple TV with Netflix Integration, TV Show Rentals
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I got through about 15 pages before jumping here to try to summarize a lot of what is being discussed here, and hopefully add some insight 
So lets talk about the 500lb gorilla in the room.
appleTV vs WDTV/MacMini/others
Streaming mkv/other formats from PC
We'll make this perfectly clear. Apple will not make it easy to watch pirated/ripped content on the appleTV. They do this by adhering to the iTunes ecosystem. If you want to watch ripped material, you will have to manage that on your own. If you want to watch legitimate material such as rentals or purchased content (from iTunes), this is dead easy to do. Apple has a few networks on board thus far, and that was surely a rocky road for them. If it was easy to watch ripped content with appleTV, they probably would have not made it this far. Yes it is possible to have legit content from other sources/formats, but at this stage it is baby out with the bath water.
Rentals only, no Purchases from appleTV
This is directly related to what they said in the keynote. Average consumers do not want to deal with storage/syncing, so the drive was removed. Consumers just want to watch their shows. Rentals make this easy to do. Purchases do not work now, since there is no way to store them. However you can purchase from another Mac computer on iTunes and watch that content easily. Rentals also make a lot of sense for single-watched material such as TV episodes. If you only watch it once, why pay full price? If you watch many times (films, kids shows) it makes more sense to purchase, so do that in iTunes and watch however often you like. So if we are all purchasing our content like good little samaritans, this all makes sense. If you want to rip stuff and watch it (legit or not), Apple is not helping you.
So one thing to complain about, purchases now require an extra computer to store things onto (iTunes.) Keep this in mind: Apple did not build the new computing facility in NC for no reason. You know they have something in mind, and I'm willing to bet this is for cloud-based services. If that becomes a reality, storage is no longer an issue. You can purchase your content and pull from your cloud storage at any time (from any device, any location.) This is the first appleTV built with A4 chip and iOS. You can bet many updates and feature changes will be coming as things become available, and as Apple (and the networks) figure out a model that works for everyone.
720p vs 1080p
You can bet they didn't omit this just for the heck of it. The current appleTV is focused on streaming content, and at this point, (most) streamed 1080p content is compressed too heavily and does not give enough advantages over 720p for the average consumer. I'm certain streaming 1080p will be an added feature when the time is right.
App store
This will most certainly come with time. The device runs on iOS, and there are too many reasons to not do this. This is appleTV with iOS version 1 folks, you don't get everything on the first run. Look at iPhone/multitasking, it took awhile. They probably don't have the model completely figured out. Patience!
So overall, I think there is a lot yet to come from Apple, and some things may never come for reasons mentioned above.
So lets talk about the 500lb gorilla in the room.
appleTV vs WDTV/MacMini/others
Streaming mkv/other formats from PC
We'll make this perfectly clear. Apple will not make it easy to watch pirated/ripped content on the appleTV. They do this by adhering to the iTunes ecosystem. If you want to watch ripped material, you will have to manage that on your own. If you want to watch legitimate material such as rentals or purchased content (from iTunes), this is dead easy to do. Apple has a few networks on board thus far, and that was surely a rocky road for them. If it was easy to watch ripped content with appleTV, they probably would have not made it this far. Yes it is possible to have legit content from other sources/formats, but at this stage it is baby out with the bath water.
Rentals only, no Purchases from appleTV
This is directly related to what they said in the keynote. Average consumers do not want to deal with storage/syncing, so the drive was removed. Consumers just want to watch their shows. Rentals make this easy to do. Purchases do not work now, since there is no way to store them. However you can purchase from another Mac computer on iTunes and watch that content easily. Rentals also make a lot of sense for single-watched material such as TV episodes. If you only watch it once, why pay full price? If you watch many times (films, kids shows) it makes more sense to purchase, so do that in iTunes and watch however often you like. So if we are all purchasing our content like good little samaritans, this all makes sense. If you want to rip stuff and watch it (legit or not), Apple is not helping you.
So one thing to complain about, purchases now require an extra computer to store things onto (iTunes.) Keep this in mind: Apple did not build the new computing facility in NC for no reason. You know they have something in mind, and I'm willing to bet this is for cloud-based services. If that becomes a reality, storage is no longer an issue. You can purchase your content and pull from your cloud storage at any time (from any device, any location.) This is the first appleTV built with A4 chip and iOS. You can bet many updates and feature changes will be coming as things become available, and as Apple (and the networks) figure out a model that works for everyone.
720p vs 1080p
You can bet they didn't omit this just for the heck of it. The current appleTV is focused on streaming content, and at this point, (most) streamed 1080p content is compressed too heavily and does not give enough advantages over 720p for the average consumer. I'm certain streaming 1080p will be an added feature when the time is right.
App store
This will most certainly come with time. The device runs on iOS, and there are too many reasons to not do this. This is appleTV with iOS version 1 folks, you don't get everything on the first run. Look at iPhone/multitasking, it took awhile. They probably don't have the model completely figured out. Patience!
So overall, I think there is a lot yet to come from Apple, and some things may never come for reasons mentioned above.
Any confirmed release date?? All the other new stuff is out next week. Only saw a mention of "4 weeks"...that's a bit vague.
OK, so I bought the new Apple TV yesterday, but saw that Apple already charged my card for the full amount. What gives? Why is Apple charging me a full MONTH before they are evening shipping the product?
sounds like a pre-auth to me. The funds will be released in a couple of days and then charged again when product is ready for shipping,
based on the sales they might ship early or late; i believe it will ship sooner (after reading so many negative comments)
it might or might not sell well; i ordered one waiting!
I ordered yesterday, it said "shipping in September" so I'd say within 4 weeks. If that is any better
You can probably find some converters at places like monoprice.com, search for HDMI converter. No clue how well they work.
Where does it claim airport is required? I'm not sure how they would limit it to one type of wireless router, or why.
A valid criticism - but not coming from Tom's, who questioned the whole concept of the iPod until it was successful, at which point they started criticising Apple for evolving the concept (sometimes successfully, other times not so much).
I don't much care for the new Nano. But I don't think being "trapped in the iTunes ecosystem" is such a terrible thing for many people. There are certainly a good number of alternatives available if iTunes doesn't meet your needs.
On the Apple TV Tech Specs page of the Apple store under system requirements it lists "AirPort Extreme."
What do you guy thinks?
Pick one:
- Airport Extreme
- Wi-Fi 802.11b, g, or n wireless network (wireless video streaming requires 802.11g or 802.11n)
- 10/100BASE-T Ethernet network
B
Well I ordered an ATV straight away as we have converted our DVD library to iTunes & hope the box might be faster than our existing one. But after reading so many non- caring threads about " the Brits" moaning about the obvious price hike I took their advice "if you don't want it then don't buy it" so I cancelled it today.
It's not the amount of money it's the principal, if it was $999 to £999 Apple might not do it but because it's a low price it seems ok to rip the UK customer off. So for what it's worth I'll vote with my cash and walk away, crazy really £12 cheaper & I really think Apple would get a lot more orders and earn a lot more respect!
I hope others can do the same...even if you hold off till Christmas or something , this really is out of order...
It's not the amount of money it's the principal, if it was $999 to £999 Apple might not do it but because it's a low price it seems ok to rip the UK customer off. So for what it's worth I'll vote with my cash and walk away, crazy really £12 cheaper & I really think Apple would get a lot more orders and earn a lot more respect!
I hope others can do the same...even if you hold off till Christmas or something , this really is out of order...
It won't work because OSX doesn't have hardware H264 decoding support for that chipset nor can it because it's the previous generation of technology that Apple doesn't support (forget the name someone else used in a different thread to explain why my 8600M GT has no H264 decoding support while it does in Windows).
I cannot believe you expect people to just throw away massive/expensive DVD collections and instantly replace them with Blu-Ray discs just because you think 480p is outdated 20th century technology and apparently unwatchable. Or do you advocate stealing them off the Internet? Even that would take a LONG time for some of us (I have over 400 DVDs). Quite frankly, the Blu-Ray versions aren't that much better for some titles and even worse in a few cases (e.g. The Fifth Element). I'm certainly not going to spend a fortune to replace 400+ DVDs when I probably watch most of them maybe once every other year at most. 480p doesn't look THAT bad even on a 93" screen at 9 feet away for most films with a good scaler.
A lot of that is Apple's own stupid fault. They should have added a control pad and two real buttons to the iPhone/Touch two generations ago when they saw gaming taking off. THOSE controls would easily be accommodated by a Wii like controller that has already proven itself a big hit and provide familiar gaming controls for many games that would quite frankly work MUCH better with hard controls (e.g. Even a game like Pacman).
Even so, Apple could start the basis for NEW games that are created with dual/alternate controls in mind and that would also allow future accessories to be sold for something like the iPad for more serious gaming. Games that work with ATV could be certified as such and flagged as such for that device.
As it is, I'm afraid the new ATV is a device in search of a virtually non-existent market. The rental prices are too high compared to physical discs (i.e. Red Box) and most people with their own stuff to display are probably going to want more support than just M4V/MOV and WAV/AAC/MP3. I've already got my entire library set up for the 1st generation ATV, so if it can be hacked for XBMC, I *MIGHT* be interested in buying one or two just because they're are $10 cheaper than an Airport Express so I could add more video rooms for cheap (seeing as it will work with my current library already set up), but I can certainly see why someone who does not already have a library set up for video or has one that is NOT M4V compatible wouldn't have the SLIGHTEST bit of interest in this device. Apple screwed the pooch on this one, I'm afraid. They clearly don't "get" what customers are looking for. Steve may understand what people want in a phone, but clearly home theater is BEYOND the man's comprehension (which is about high quality everything not the lowest possible denominator).
Then there's the fact he's launching the thing without support from anyone other than Disney and Fox. It's kind of like that big announcement that you can FINALLY *BUY* HD movies from iTunes. Yeah, there was like 3 good movies and 10 crap movies available when that announcement was made.
And there isn't a whole heck of a lot more since then (yes, plenty of ATV rental ONLY items, but jack squat for BUY and rent for all other iTunes devices).I'm thinking the new software for ATV is more like an app for the iPad, basically and the ATV is just a way to hook it up to your big screen. The wireless transmission option is there to make it easy to do from your iPad or iPhone. The problem is that is ALL it's for. It completely ignores that 1080p even exists, even for home movies and stuff you add yourself and that is ridiculous in 2010 regardless what you think of the need for 1080p. As this thread demonstrates MANY MANY people simply WILL NOT buy a device without support for 1080p in it (regardless of what you think of that opinion). The point is that EVERYONE ELSE has 1080p and so that makes Apple look like one apple short of a pie.
Don't waste your time trying to convince Apple-hating trolls of reasons why some people might find this device useful.
Steve Jobs could have showed off a device that fits in the palm of your hand and brings every movie and TV show ever made to your TV in full 1080p, for free, and people like this would find some reason to complain about it, or tell you how much better you could do the same thing with a Microsoft/Google solution.
I think you're 100% CLUELESS if you honestly believe this has ANYTHING to do with Apple as a company in general. This is absolutely to do with Apple putting out a brain dead product and not listening to what people want (only what's in Jobs' head). People are DEMANDING 1080p support for new home theater equipment and if it doesn't have it then it's an automatic FAIL. The sad part is that Apple SHOULD have learned this lesson from the first ATV, but clearly Jobs wasn't paying the SLIGHTEST bit of attention to what people had to offer for feedback on the device. Not one bit.
The ONLY thing that makes this device attractive is that it's cheaper than an Airport Express, which means I can add basic video to rooms for less than adding an audio only room (i.e. it makes NO sense to buy more Airport Express devices to put audio in the rest of my house when I can get these for $10 less and they can do audio only or audio + video). If it supported 1080p, it would/could be a big hit. The possibilities for supporting iOS apps made it even more potentially attractive. Apple missed the boat, at least on the initial release (which is kind of important since it'll never get this kind of attention again).
Who the heck is "we" ???
In any case, your points are totally absurd since you can get content from any number of legitimate sources these days (including a huge variety of HD camcorders for home movies; ever hear of those? I have tons of SD hom movies and I've converted them to run on my 1st gen ATV, but why would I want to downgrade 1080p home movies to 720p just to run on ATV and then Apple provides NO HELP what-so-ever to do even that much from iTunes. They'll let you rip CDs all day long from iTunes, but convert your own movies? No way. And we already know they won't support competitor formats. And THAT is what you should have said in the first place. Apple will not make it easy to watch content from ANYONE BUT APPLE on APPLE products. THAT is *THE* bottom line. 1080p is not important to Apple because they don't want to sell it so YOU DON'T NEED IT. That's why all their products (iPhone, new iPod Touch) only do 720p. 1080p doesn't exist in Steve Jobs' world and so apple fritters shouldn't believe it exists either.This is just an absurd statement as you imply no "legitimate" content can come from anyone but Apple (seeing as you won't be able to import anything from anyone else because Apple won't support their formats). I mean just get a clue already. Stop acting like Apple is the only fruit in the Universe and that everyone else should just pretend all the watermelons, grapes and figs don't exist. OK, now I'm getting hungry.
Bunk argument is bunk. If the hardware supports 1080p, it has no impact on the content being streamed/downloaded, that can be 720p to save on bandwidth without any issues.
This thing also supports local streaming from a Mac, which is not bandwidth constrained.
Seriously, people keep repeating this bunk argument over and over and it still doesn't make anymore sense now than it did the first time.
My iPhone 3GS can playback 1080P apple trailers. But they don't advertise that fact. When the content becomes available on iTunes. Expect a firmware update.
Have you been living under a rock the last month ? Hulu annouced there streaming on alot of internet ready TVs blu ray players PS3 and 360 by the end of the year.
I was really excited about the new Apple TV until I saw one thing:
720p video.
Unfortunately, that was absolutely the deal breaker for me. In this day and age, it's 1080p or no go, for myself at least. It's kind of a bummer considering this thing will have YouTube, NetFlix, a super clean interface (it is Apple after all...), all for ONLY $99.
For now, the Boxee device is looking quite interesting...
720p video.
Unfortunately, that was absolutely the deal breaker for me. In this day and age, it's 1080p or no go, for myself at least. It's kind of a bummer considering this thing will have YouTube, NetFlix, a super clean interface (it is Apple after all...), all for ONLY $99.
For now, the Boxee device is looking quite interesting...
Worstiest product ever!
HA, thanks for the laugh.
but honestly, i think this is much better then the previous version - except it doesnt have storage
(or a USB port to attach stuff!)