Apple TV Gets Upgrades; Still Not For Me
Apple has just released a new revision of their Apple
TV. The main upgrade comes with the $100 160GB hard drive upgrade
over the past 40GB. You can still purchase both, 40GB for $299 and 160GB
for $399. I still say the product
sucks, unless
you are a big iTunes user.
The other upgrade comes with YouTube
support. A nice edition to show off that 720p iTunes downloads are
clearly not ready. YouTube is a nice addition, Media Center Extender
users have
been able to do this for a while now and to me it’s clearly a cover feature
until Apple can get 720p iTunes content. I mean really, what better way
to show off a device built for “widescreen” TV’s other than low bitrate 4x3
Flash-encoded content (Edit: "YouTube
will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format"). My
question about YouTube support is if you can actually search for content?
On the subject of HD downloads, Jobs said "We're not
selling HD yet, because of the tradeoffs between download time and quality. But
that might change in the future…" [Via
Macworld]. Understandable reason, but somehow I think there is more
to it. H.264 is the best they are going to get in terms of compression,
and the pipe to your house isn’t going to change all that much in the next
year. Other services have been providing 720p downloads for years
now. Sure, it takes a while to download but that is part of the game.
Lastly, Jobs doesn’t seem to sure that the living room is
the place for Apple, calling it a “hobby.” He says “The reason I call it
a hobby is, a lot of people have tried and failed to make it a business. And
it’s a hard problem. So we’re trying. I think if we work on it and improve
things over the next year, 18 months, we can crack that.” [Via
Macworld]
