2 posts tagged “appletv”
Incidentally, my lack of posting recently has been due to a pretty busy period at work, which looks like continuing for the new few weeks. But since it's the weekend, I'm making up for lost time. :)
Anyways, I came across these two Apple-related links and [these are good].
The first is a blog entry on why the AppleTV is going to be successful, from ZDNet's Alan Graham. I think Graham pretty much hits the nail on the head, and certainly expresses why "I WANT MY APPLETV!". Basically, instead of trying to force a computer into people's living rooms, like M$'s MediaCenter or whatever it's called, Apple have again gone the simple route and designed a device that does what people want : give them a way to watch TV that they've downloaded on their TVs, with the simplicity of a DVD player or Tivo.
It's not surprising to me at all that one of the usual rumor sites reported that Apple has already sold out their initial order of 100,000 AppleTVs, totally surpassing their own expectations. 100,000 x US$299 is a cool US$30 million of brand new revenue. I have no idea what kind of margins Apple might be getting on AppleTVs, I'm sure that they are going to end up making a lot from them, since they are basically 40GB harddrives with A/V out, a wireless 802.11n chipset and a cheap Intel processor to handle decoding.
Moving to the second link, it's a Flickr gallery of someone's basement Mac museum (Thanks again to the ever-interesting Daring Fireball for the link).
And I thought my collection of Macs was bad...
OK, so a few days have passed since my initial reaction to the iPhone, and I must admit that - given time to recover from the effects of Jobs' famous Reality Distortion Field - I've started to see some of the weaknesses in the product.
I don't agree with those who say that the lack of 3G is huge omission. It has wi-fi which is faster, so who needs 3G? I can understand that some people may not have access to free (or paid) wi-fi hotspots and just want to surf off their 3G telephone service, but I still don't think it's that big a deal.
However, I do have misgivings about the virtual keyboard - although what else do you do if you have a touchscreen device? - and the fairly poor battery life that Jobs mentioned. The harddisk space - either 4GB or 8GB - is also pretty pathetic given that this is supposed to be a multimedia (i.e video) player, but I suppose that's also an inevitable trade-off between size, price and battery life.
I still think that the iPhone is going to be a huge hit. It isn't perfect, but neither is any other competing product in the market. And Apple still has five months to get it right(er). Plus, the beauty and ease of use of the interface and design probably overcomes any of the shortcomings.
As for the Cisco trademark issue, that's an unfortunate PR screwup that took some of the shine off the initial euphoria; not helped, of course, by the 'revelation' in the WSJ that the Feds were investigating Jobs' long-since-cancelled options grant - didn't we know this already?
As these things usually go, Cisco and Apple will probably end up settling, although Apple seems ready for a fight. At first blush, the advantage appears to be Cisco's, but some interesting possible arguments on Apple's side have already surfaced, including the possibility that Cisco itself might have failed to 'renew' their trademark.
Sure, it would be great if AppleTV also supported DivX, but I've been using VisualHub to convert my DivX content into MPEG-4 anyway, so that it plays nicely with similarly non-DivX iTunes. If you want stuff to 'just work', there are bound to be some limitations.
In fact, in preparation for the AppleTV, I also bought a Miglia EvolutionTV external DVR box yesterday. While Elgato's EyeTV line is far more visible and popular, the advantage of the EvolutionTV is that it can do hardware conversion to MPEG-4 (and also DivX) when recording. In contrast, the EyeTV 250's hardware conversion is only to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, neither of which would play nicely with the AppleTV. So with the EvolutionTV, I can record stuff (like United matches) directly to MPEG-4, and send that directly to iTunes or the AppleTV.
New toys to look forward to. I'm a happy camper.
