Best way to immerse myself in the Apple ecosystem?

[PaulWog]

The run-down of what I have / will be picking up: I'm pretty set on getting a Retina Macbook Pro 13" as my non-desktop solution. We already have two Apple TV's in the house. I know my next phone will be an iPhone (when my contract is up in a year) -- because my last two phones have been Samsungs and both have been terrible disappointments. I have an iPad 3.

Anyways, long and short of it: What hardware should I consider getting (in addition to what I've mentioned above) in order to get the most out of the Apple ecosystem? So far, the only thing I'm considering other than the Macbook Pro is the Airport Time Capsule (2TB). I assume I can use it to store all of my media content, and play that content from the Time Capsule through my Macbook onto my Apple TV.

Anything else I'm missing? Any software, hardware, or configurations that I should really consider?

 

[rkRusty]

You should be fine with what you've got.
If you can stomach the price plans I'd suggest getting involved in iCloud, which would allow you to sync your documents etc across all devices. Handoff and continuity should work anyway if your devices are updated to iOS 8+. If you don't plan on having a centralised desktop, maybe consider getting a top-tier 13" rMBP to handle heavier workloads and going with 16 gig of RAM, depending on what you will use the computer for.
The best way to keep everything in sync and organised would be to add a NAS device.

 

[PaulWog]

You should be fine with what you've got.
If you can stomach the price plans I'd suggest getting involved in iCloud, which would allow you to sync your documents etc across all devices. Handoff and continuity should work anyway if your devices are updated to iOS 8+. If you don't plan on having a centralised desktop, maybe consider getting a top-tier 13" rMBP to handle heavier workloads and going with 16 gig of RAM, depending on what you will use the computer for.
The best way to keep everything in sync and organised would be to add a NAS device.

Is the Airport Time Capsule the sort of NAS device you're talking about? I mean, in an ideal world, the Apple Watch could touch against a pad on the laptop and with a matched password get all of my data in a split second onto the 10TB storage on the watch, and 1TB per second data transfer rate both ways... but a wireless hard drive in the house isn't too bad.

Also, why 16GB of RAM? Right now my desktop runs on 8GB of RAM, and I think the only times I want more is when I am running photoshop, lightroom, google chrome, and a game all simultaneously. I'm not sure if the transition to OS X would be significantly different in terms of RAM usage.

I do have a centralized computer, but I'm not sure how well a Windows 7 desktop (or Windows 10 eventually) would work with the other Apple stuff. I'm not willing to go Apple with the desktop for the foreseeable future, so that's one small cog in the whole setup.

 

[godrifle]

Methinks you're going to be disappointed at how poorly Apple has tackled the living room. They do not have an ecosystem for easily and elegantly sharing your content to the big screen.

FYI, Time Capsule should not be considered a NAS device. It is a backup device. You can use third-party apps (like File Explorer) to stream content from it, but...

If you want to use AppleTV to directly access your content (videos, photos, music), you'll need a computer running iTunes. AppleTV can only play content on the local network via iTunes running on a computer. Ridiculous? Yes.

You *can* use your iOS device (iPhone/iPad) to connect via Airplay to devices (like NAS) that house your content, and either watch them on that device or rebroadcast to AppleTV. If you rebroadcast from your iOS device to AppleTV, be prepared for defects.

I have been using AirVideo HD (http://www.inmethod.com/airvideohd/index.html) for a while now, and it far surpasses the quality of streaming video from my iOS device to my AppleTV. It has two parts: a server software that resides on a Mac (where your videos are located).

Hope this helps. Cheers.

 

[rkRusty]

Is the Airport Time Capsule the sort of NAS device you're talking about? I mean, in an ideal world, the Apple Watch could touch against a pad on the laptop and with a matched password get all of my data in a split second onto the 10TB storage on the watch, and 1TB per second data transfer rate both ways... but a wireless hard drive in the house isn't too bad.

Also, why 16GB of RAM? Right now my desktop runs on 8GB of RAM, and I think the only times I want more is when I am running photoshop, lightroom, google chrome, and a game all simultaneously. I'm not sure if the transition to OS X would be significantly different in terms of RAM usage.

I do have a centralized computer, but I'm not sure how well a Windows 7 desktop (or Windows 10 eventually) would work with the other Apple stuff. I'm not willing to go Apple with the desktop for the foreseeable future, so that's one small cog in the whole setup.

The Time Capsule is not a NAS. It's simply a WiFi router with 2/3Tb of storage for Time Machine backups. A NAS is a dedicated device that sits in the corner on your home network aggregating all your documents, downloads, photos, backups etc. ready to be accessed across all your computers. Like Dropbox but on your home network, not the cloud. Useful if you want to keep everything organised locally.

You may not need 16 gigs of RAM, just might be worthwhile if you intended to make the rMBP your only computer and use it for heavy workloads. I personally have a rMBP 15" for travelling with work, as well as a desktop PC running Windows 8.1. The two run completely in sync; Home Sharing in iTunes allows me to share my music/films between the two as well as to my Apple TV, iCloud does the same for my documents, Bonjour allows me to print to my Airport Extreme wirelessly and my Airport Express allows me to play music from any device to my Airplay speakers. I use a NAS to store backups of everything.
Obviously you don't get things like Handoff/continuity on Windows, but that's not a big loss.