A friend of mine, Justin, sent me the following articles about the Apple TV…
…and here’s my response to them.
I read the articles, but what they are complaining about isn’t what I want an Apple TV for. I want to rip all my DVDs to my computer, and play them via the Apple TV to my HD TV. It also allows me to view my iPhoto library on my TV, and play my music library in the living room, on my 5.1 surround sound system. It seems that ArsTechnica and Popular Mechanics are complaining about lack of content. I don’t want to buy content over the internet for my Apple TV. I own and buy a lot of media. I want to rip it to my Apple TV. Sure, being able to buy HD media on the Apple store would be really cool, but the lack thereof doesn’t make it a crappy device. That being said, I think Apple’s sales projections were flawed. There just isn’t the market yet for the Apple TV in the scale that they wanted. At this point in time, it’s a geek’s toy, not an “every man” appliance. In time Apple will get content for the Apple TV. In fact, when the Apple TV was released, Apple was in talks with the studios to get content. Unfortunately, a lot of the deals fell through. (Hell, the writer’s strike is going on right now because of the movie industry’s greed in regard to online content.) Eventually you’ll be able to get movies and TV from iTunes in HD formats. When that happens, the Apple TV will be desired a lot more than it is now to the “every man.” I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.