Review: Setting up Apple TV is easy - Pros and Cons
Saturday, 14 April 2007

Purchased an Apple TV a few days ago and set it up that night. Awesome! It was pretty easy. Just plugged it into the power, ethernet (could be wireless) and TV and away I went. You have to open up ITunes on your PC/Mac and you can select which media you'd like to sync.

 

See more  below for pros and cons...

 

Pros:Laughing

 

  • Easy to set up.
  • Works well with iTunes.
  • I now have access ot Music, Photos and Movies form our lounge room without having to go over the wireless network in realtime. We were using Airport Express and and would experience dropouts occasionally when playing music... AppleTV caches everything locally.

 

Cons:Frown

  • 40GB drive is not big enough, I am probably going to have to follow one of the hacks and replace the hard drive with a bigger one. Note sure why Apple made it so small or difficult to replace/extend? Ie you should be able to plug an external USB drive into the USB port.
  • Syncing took some time over the wireless network
  • Requires Component video or HDMI... if you have a TV that only takes Composite or S-video you'll lose colours. This has left me looking at purchasing a LCD TV... way more than the cost of the AppleTV. Perhaps it should be called AppleHDTV Tongue out
  • It would not synch my movies created with iMove/iDvd - not sure but it said that AppleTV could not play these movies... mmm a bit frustrating.. actually I found a solution you need to convert in to MP4
  • Arrgggggh - I disconnected my Powerbook frommy USB drive which had all my Photos on it... and synched - guess what happened? Doh? It removed all 10 GB of Photos from the Apple TV....it makes sense.. but just no warning. I guess it makes sense to keep Synch on Manual. Not sure if Apple could think of something to help make it more idiot-proof.

 

All in all, a great purchase.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 04 July 2007 )