AppleTV

I happened to be at the Apple store in Bellevue Square and I got to take Apple TV for a spin. Before I share my thoughts, a few caveats. First, I'm commenting as a consumer. I don't consider the Apple TV competitive with what I do for a living, but just in case, these are purely my opinions not those of MS. Second, there was a time in my career where I did work on similar (some would argue exactly the same) technology. So, my critiques will be biased by that previous experience. With that out of the way....

Initial impression: I was surprised at how small the unit was (and how much it resembled the mini). I still don't understand why Apple doesn't make it look more like a traditional piece of AV equipment in both shape and color. Frankly, it would stick out in my media rack and I think it is a bit distracting. The other thing I noticed right away was how hot it ran. There is no way I could put is in my rack without overheating the components. I already have that problem with my 360, I don't need to compound it.

I thought the UI was very nice. It was clean, simple and elegant. Looking at the images and how fast they render, I'm guessing that everything is cached locally for display. That is something extender doesn't do (or doesn't do well). So long as they don't add too many options, the UI should remain pretty straightforward (if limited). I was disappointed in the capacity of the drive. 40G is smaller than my iPod. I don't think it would be very useful. I didn't ask, but I'd want to make sure it hooked up to my PC. They said it connects to iTunes and since iTunes runs on my PC, I'd expect it to be both PC and Mac compatible, but I wasn't able to check. I'd love to see the set-up for a PC network. That has always been the bug-a-boo of streaming content to devices.

The thing that really turned me off was the quality of the video. I was surprised at how poor the images were. They are pixelated and there were tons of artifacts. I played with several of the menus just to make sure I wasn't getting a poor feed (Podcasts, TV shows, etc). All were consistently bad. My wife even commented on the "fuzzy" nature of the video. Combine that with the fact that I just can't see myself hooking up another box to my TV, I think this is going to be a product I pass on. I'm going to stick with the 360 for now.