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Initial Orders for New Apple TV Being Prepared for Shipment
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I ordered mine on Sep 1, 2010 at 04:04 PM PDT and there still hasn't been any progress updateI wonder how they're deciding which orders to ship? I live in Wisconsin, so maybe it's a regional thing?
I think they just hate the Green Bay Packers
I ordered mine on Sep 1, 2010 at 04:04 PM PDT and there still hasn't been any progress update
I ordered mine at 1:54 and i only got the shipping notice this morning at 7
Not every Apple product has to be groundbreaking and "Magical" to be worth buying. Ease of integration into existing systems is key in this market. If it's tough to setup or to use, people just don't use it. This is especially true when using non-physical media. Setting up streaming systems for your movie library on your ps2 or xbox can be a PITA for the average person.
I'm going to be using it to stream ripped movies stored in a Drobo on a Mac Mini Server. Saving 1-2 DVDs that get ruined a month by little kids makes this thing pay itself off in no time. Not to mention the added convenience of not having to shuffle discs.
I wish Apple would integrate a dvd ripping solution into their products for use with these, as it's the weak link in this chain. Handbrake works sufficiently though most people could be easily intimidated by its UI.
I agree with this, except this AppleTV, for now, doesn't worth buying at all unless you're really in need of a iTunes only TV box. There are much better and broader options out there at similar price points.
And I didn't pretend every Apple product needs to bring a new groundbreaking market, I asked the poster who claimed it did to which new market he was referring to.
AppleTV will remain a hobby until Apple starts to take it seriously.
At first, I was disappointed it wasn't a full 1080p but doing a little research changed my mind. I currently watch streaming 720p movies on Netflix through my XBox 360 and they look great on my 46" 1080p Samsung. Last night, I ordered a 1080p movie through Zune and told it to download instead of stream because I had previously ordered a standard def Zune movie and it kept kicking out because the streaming couldn't keep up. FIVE HOURS later, it was only at 55% with no Play button yet so I gave up on watching it that night. I have standard cable modem internet. When I found out XBox Live was going to $60/yr, it was a no-brainer to switch to Apple TV. iTunes has all the same movies for sale as Zune and more. Plus, I can stream content from my macbook pro. If there are cool apps in the future, it'll be a bonus! I also looked into getting a blu ray player with internet capability but when I thought about it, I don't own any blu ray movies now, don't want to buy any and I think watching movies from dvd is a dying method anyway so why would I invest in it now?
I'M GLAD APPLE TV IS STREAMING 720p! It's appropriate to the content and streaming ability that's out there right now to the vast majority of people who want to watch a movie right away (and don't steal/rip movies or own hd cameras).
I ordered mine Sept. 26 and it's supposed to be delivered Oct 22.
I'M GLAD APPLE TV IS STREAMING 720p! It's appropriate to the content and streaming ability that's out there right now to the vast majority of people who want to watch a movie right away (and don't steal/rip movies or own hd cameras).
I ordered mine Sept. 26 and it's supposed to be delivered Oct 22.
I ordered mine on Sep 1, 2010 at 04:04 PM PDT and there still hasn't been any progress update
I'm also in Wisconsin and mine says the 30th.
Not really disagreeing with you, but thought I'd continue the interesting discussion.
True. The reason I didn't get an original apple tv at first was financial. When it came out, I was still in grad school, so couldn't really justify the $230 price tag. Now that I'm out of school and making twice what I did as a student, I have more disposable income. I considered getting an Apple TV about a year ago, and could have afforded it then, but I noticed that the hardware was about 3 years old, and I figured Apple had to be close to coming out with an upgraded version. I don't like buying something only to have it eclipsed by a much better version just a few months later. Especially because I'd been hearing reports online (mainly read Chris Breen's articles on macworld) that the 1st gen apple tv hardware was struggling to put up the 720p video, and was underpowered for playing Hulu video (using the atv flash / boxee hack, which I expect will be available at some point for this new version). Hence, I decided to set up my old powerbook G4 instead, which would handle most of what I wanted well enough (through Front Row) until the new Apple TV came out. Luckily, that paid off, and the price came down (a lot!) as a bonus. From those who played with the new apple tv at the announcement (again, as reported on macworld.com), it sounds like the UI and functionality of the new version will be noticeably faster/snappier than the old version, which makes sense since the old version has some pretty recent software running on 4-year-old hardware.
Well, my decision on this was more logistical, not philosophical. When I first got the camcorder in anticipation of my son's birth, I definitely intended to shoot in 1080p all the time. But after doing that for a couple of months, I noticed three things:
1. The amount of room that the 1080p (or 720p, for that matter) stuff takes up on my hard drive is so much that I've already started storing this stuff exclusively on an external hard drive, which brings in more logistical issues because now I have to have an even bigger Time Machine backup hard drive to get both my mac and the external backed up. Doubling that (720p vs. 1080p) makes the problem of even higher magnitude, and more expensive.
2. Playing both 1080p and 720p on my 37" TV yields what I consider to be an unnoticeable difference in quality to me. I find that, at these high resolutions, the quality of the lighting conditions and focus has a much bigger impact on the quality of the video-viewing-experience than whether it's 1080p or 720p. Since lighting conditions and focus tend to vary pretty often in a given home movie, 1080p just didn't seem worth the extra file management issues I'd have. (Stuff I shoot with my camcorder does look better than what I shoot with my iPhone4, but not because it's higher resolution: because the camcorder has better optics. A 720p vid shot on my camcorder looks better than a 720p vid shot with my iphone 4. But that difference is more significant than the diff between the 1080p and 720p versions of the same vid, both shot on the camcorder.) I agree that the file size issue will probably change as hard drives get bigger and bigger, but for now the slight improvement I notice (my wife doesn't notice a difference at all) from the higher resolution is not worth the very real extra time I need to spend managing storage.
3. The act of importing the stuff from my camcorder into iMovie, editing, deciding where to save and whether to import into iTunes is such a hassle that we've rarely used that 1080p camcorder since we got our iPhone 4's. Now we shoot most of our video on our iPhones (720p, the quality is pretty good, and the phones are always on us anyway so that's one less thing to bring). Our SLR camera does HD video (up to 1080p) as well, but again I don't shoot that high resolution with it because of file size. I can see using the good camcorder at events like parties and such, but when we're just playing with the baby, and often not within arm-reach distance of the SLR or camcorder, the iPhone 4 video is of good-enough quality AND it's always easily accessible. Plus, those videos synch into iTunes whenever we synch our phones without any extra work on our part, and I can trim the videos on the phone itself immediately after I've shot them, saving myself file size before the video even gets onto my computer. A more sustainable workflow.
Meh. Just because a new apple TV could do 1080p would not motivate me to spend the time to somehow re-render all my footage to 1080p. I'd just watch it in 720p on the 1080p-capable apple TV. (Again, having shot and viewed both 1080p and 720p home video, I'm not convinced that the quality difference is worth the extra time/storage required.) So yes, I am limiting my max resolution to 720p for now, at least.
I get your argument that for these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities you want the best quality recording method possible, but, . . . let me exagerate your logic to make a point: If I want to capture my son in the highest res possible, I ought to get a camera capable of recording in 3D 1440p (expensive but possible, nowadays), since one day we might have 1440p HD 3D Tv sets, and I wouldn't want to be limited to measly 1080p. Yeah, I know, that's a smart alecky tact for me to take, but in a few years when hard drives are big enough that 1080p storage is a non issue, this same dilemma will rear its ugly head with 1440p vs. 1080p. I just see it as a phenomenon of diminishing returns: stuff gets better and better, but not by that much.
Now, all that said, obviously some people will be like me and say "720p is good enough for my home movies", and others will be like you and say "1080p is higher-quality and more future proof, so I'm doing it!" Given that. . .
Yes, it would have been nice, and "better". The decision not to support 1080p must have been a marketing strategy, and I feel like it was a reasonable one from Apple's point of view, given their goals to remain competitive in the living room. Here's why I think that:
a. bumping up the processor so it could support 1080p (to apple's high user-interface standards) would have pushed the price point higher. . . say another $30 or so, just pulling a number out of the air from the cost difference between the Roku players.
b. The low $99 price point is a major psychological motivator to get lots of people to actually try out this product without sweating it too much. . .
Apple must have seen the oncoming and existing competition (Roku, boxee box, etc), and, learning from their experience with the iPhone, decided the best way to improve their market penetration is to sell something for a low price and make up the profits in volume.
If apple had put out a 720p version of apple tv and a 1080p version of apple tv for a bit higher cost (say, $130), then yes that may have better for the consumer, but it probably wasn't worth it to Apple to engage the extra resources to make two versions of that product, especially if they foresee discontinuing the 720p version within a year or two. Think about the original iPhone: it came out in a 4GB and an 8GB version. From what I understood, the ratio of 8GB to 4GB models sold was so huge that Apple discontinued the 4GB version within a few months. In retrospect, they probably should have just made the 8GB and never spent resources on having the 4GB product line at all (I'm assuming there's some additional overhead and resources required to have a slightly different product being manufactured).
IF they did a 720p version and 1080p version of apple tv with a $30 price gap, Apple may have seen it as not worth the extra resources to have a 720p line at all, but they couldn't get a 1080p version under $100, and they saw the lower price point as the more important market strategy right now.
*shrug* this is all conjecture on my part, of course. I don't actually know why Apple didn't include the 1080p support. But it seems Apple is focusing on simplicity here, at least for now. They want to concentrate their resources on selling a whole bunch of these before Christmas at a "why not?" price to get new apple tv users. Similar to what they did with the first generation iphone (what? It doesn't support 3G? Outrageous!).
So yeah, in general, Apple has been pretty consistent about putting out products that generally don't have all the top-of-the-line specs at launch. But they have been successful because people see their products as being easier to use. 1080p support was a victim of Apple's strategy to get a lot of people to buy Apple TV's before Google TV and Boxee Boxes came out (maybe?). Once they've got a greater standardized market penetration, I expect the apple tv upgrade cycle will be similar to that of the iphone. Or, maybe at least every 2 years instead of 4.
It's good that you see all these applciations for theTV. It will do all of that very well. The old version does too, except that it didn't get the airplay feature. Other than airplay, Apple has had the ability for you to do all of that for the last 4 years.
True. The reason I didn't get an original apple tv at first was financial. When it came out, I was still in grad school, so couldn't really justify the $230 price tag. Now that I'm out of school and making twice what I did as a student, I have more disposable income. I considered getting an Apple TV about a year ago, and could have afforded it then, but I noticed that the hardware was about 3 years old, and I figured Apple had to be close to coming out with an upgraded version. I don't like buying something only to have it eclipsed by a much better version just a few months later. Especially because I'd been hearing reports online (mainly read Chris Breen's articles on macworld) that the 1st gen apple tv hardware was struggling to put up the 720p video, and was underpowered for playing Hulu video (using the atv flash / boxee hack, which I expect will be available at some point for this new version). Hence, I decided to set up my old powerbook G4 instead, which would handle most of what I wanted well enough (through Front Row) until the new Apple TV came out. Luckily, that paid off, and the price came down (a lot!) as a bonus. From those who played with the new apple tv at the announcement (again, as reported on macworld.com), it sounds like the UI and functionality of the new version will be noticeably faster/snappier than the old version, which makes sense since the old version has some pretty recent software running on 4-year-old hardware.
Well, my decision on this was more logistical, not philosophical. When I first got the camcorder in anticipation of my son's birth, I definitely intended to shoot in 1080p all the time. But after doing that for a couple of months, I noticed three things:
1. The amount of room that the 1080p (or 720p, for that matter) stuff takes up on my hard drive is so much that I've already started storing this stuff exclusively on an external hard drive, which brings in more logistical issues because now I have to have an even bigger Time Machine backup hard drive to get both my mac and the external backed up. Doubling that (720p vs. 1080p) makes the problem of even higher magnitude, and more expensive.
2. Playing both 1080p and 720p on my 37" TV yields what I consider to be an unnoticeable difference in quality to me. I find that, at these high resolutions, the quality of the lighting conditions and focus has a much bigger impact on the quality of the video-viewing-experience than whether it's 1080p or 720p. Since lighting conditions and focus tend to vary pretty often in a given home movie, 1080p just didn't seem worth the extra file management issues I'd have. (Stuff I shoot with my camcorder does look better than what I shoot with my iPhone4, but not because it's higher resolution: because the camcorder has better optics. A 720p vid shot on my camcorder looks better than a 720p vid shot with my iphone 4. But that difference is more significant than the diff between the 1080p and 720p versions of the same vid, both shot on the camcorder.) I agree that the file size issue will probably change as hard drives get bigger and bigger, but for now the slight improvement I notice (my wife doesn't notice a difference at all) from the higher resolution is not worth the very real extra time I need to spend managing storage.
3. The act of importing the stuff from my camcorder into iMovie, editing, deciding where to save and whether to import into iTunes is such a hassle that we've rarely used that 1080p camcorder since we got our iPhone 4's. Now we shoot most of our video on our iPhones (720p, the quality is pretty good, and the phones are always on us anyway so that's one less thing to bring). Our SLR camera does HD video (up to 1080p) as well, but again I don't shoot that high resolution with it because of file size. I can see using the good camcorder at events like parties and such, but when we're just playing with the baby, and often not within arm-reach distance of the SLR or camcorder, the iPhone 4 video is of good-enough quality AND it's always easily accessible. Plus, those videos synch into iTunes whenever we synch our phones without any extra work on our part, and I can trim the videos on the phone itself immediately after I've shot them, saving myself file size before the video even gets onto my computer. A more sustainable workflow.
. . .
Your alternative implies that you'll either be locked at 720p MAX because you shot your master footage at a quality less than you could have, or you'll need to go back and re-render all your accumulated footage by that point in time so that you have 1080p versions when there's a 1080p
Meh. Just because a new apple TV could do 1080p would not motivate me to spend the time to somehow re-render all my footage to 1080p. I'd just watch it in 720p on the 1080p-capable apple TV. (Again, having shot and viewed both 1080p and 720p home video, I'm not convinced that the quality difference is worth the extra time/storage required.) So yes, I am limiting my max resolution to 720p for now, at least.
I get your argument that for these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities you want the best quality recording method possible, but, . . . let me exagerate your logic to make a point: If I want to capture my son in the highest res possible, I ought to get a camera capable of recording in 3D 1440p (expensive but possible, nowadays), since one day we might have 1440p HD 3D Tv sets, and I wouldn't want to be limited to measly 1080p. Yeah, I know, that's a smart alecky tact for me to take, but in a few years when hard drives are big enough that 1080p storage is a non issue, this same dilemma will rear its ugly head with 1440p vs. 1080p. I just see it as a phenomenon of diminishing returns: stuff gets better and better, but not by that much.
Now, all that said, obviously some people will be like me and say "720p is good enough for my home movies", and others will be like you and say "1080p is higher-quality and more future proof, so I'm doing it!" Given that. . .
Wouldn't it have been nice if Apple had rolled out a 1080p capable
Yes, it would have been nice, and "better". The decision not to support 1080p must have been a marketing strategy, and I feel like it was a reasonable one from Apple's point of view, given their goals to remain competitive in the living room. Here's why I think that:
a. bumping up the processor so it could support 1080p (to apple's high user-interface standards) would have pushed the price point higher. . . say another $30 or so, just pulling a number out of the air from the cost difference between the Roku players.
b. The low $99 price point is a major psychological motivator to get lots of people to actually try out this product without sweating it too much. . .
Apple must have seen the oncoming and existing competition (Roku, boxee box, etc), and, learning from their experience with the iPhone, decided the best way to improve their market penetration is to sell something for a low price and make up the profits in volume.
If apple had put out a 720p version of apple tv and a 1080p version of apple tv for a bit higher cost (say, $130), then yes that may have better for the consumer, but it probably wasn't worth it to Apple to engage the extra resources to make two versions of that product, especially if they foresee discontinuing the 720p version within a year or two. Think about the original iPhone: it came out in a 4GB and an 8GB version. From what I understood, the ratio of 8GB to 4GB models sold was so huge that Apple discontinued the 4GB version within a few months. In retrospect, they probably should have just made the 8GB and never spent resources on having the 4GB product line at all (I'm assuming there's some additional overhead and resources required to have a slightly different product being manufactured).
IF they did a 720p version and 1080p version of apple tv with a $30 price gap, Apple may have seen it as not worth the extra resources to have a 720p line at all, but they couldn't get a 1080p version under $100, and they saw the lower price point as the more important market strategy right now.
*shrug* this is all conjecture on my part, of course. I don't actually know why Apple didn't include the 1080p support. But it seems Apple is focusing on simplicity here, at least for now. They want to concentrate their resources on selling a whole bunch of these before Christmas at a "why not?" price to get new apple tv users. Similar to what they did with the first generation iphone (what? It doesn't support 3G? Outrageous!).
So yeah, in general, Apple has been pretty consistent about putting out products that generally don't have all the top-of-the-line specs at launch. But they have been successful because people see their products as being easier to use. 1080p support was a victim of Apple's strategy to get a lot of people to buy Apple TV's before Google TV and Boxee Boxes came out (maybe?). Once they've got a greater standardized market penetration, I expect the apple tv upgrade cycle will be similar to that of the iphone. Or, maybe at least every 2 years instead of 4.
I ordered mine Sept 1, the UK store order status says waiting to ship, If I try the order status on the US store it says prepared to ship. I've also just received an email from Apple to say my method of shipping has been upgraded for free. All I need to know now is the delivery date!
If it's ios, which it sure seems to be, it'll be jailbroken in no time, giving you a plethora of new options.
Just got the same message from the UK store about upgrading the shipping method. Checked order status on UK Store - still saying September.
You aren't alone there, so is mine. If i can pick this up in store before I get this delivery, I will. Totally ridiculous for a "pre-order" from 12:00PM on 9/1. I don't remember even seeing expedited shipping options that others had used. Others will have theirs as soon as
How about because he is claiming he received the item today. Only this weekend were shipping statuses changed to "prepared for shipment". Everyone else has ETAs of Thursday and later.