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AppleTV

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With all the chatter about the AppleTV, it’s interesting to hear someone’s opinions on why you should NOT rush out to buy one. Dubfrog from our Live Community sent in this Top Five list of reasons not to buy AppleTV. What IS AppleTV, you ask? Apple TV lets you rent movies, buy TV shows and music, and view your .Mac and Flickr photos from the best seat in the house… yours.

  • You have a fifth-generation iPod with video and a $20 bill in your pocket. If you have a full-sized iPod with a video screen, you’re in luck: a lot of AppleTVs functionality is already sitting inside your iPod. It’s waiting to be used with literally any TV you own. All you need is a $15-20 iPod AV Cable from one of more than ten vendors, and you can play music, photos, and videos directly from your iPod, with up to 80 Gigs of storage space. Counterpoint: You’ll have to give up AppleTVs on-TV menuing and use the iPod’s screen to select content.
  • You don’t have a high-definition TV, or don’t use one as your primary set. Apple mandates that you have a widescreen television capable of at least 480P resolution, which means that you’ll almost certainly need to have a high-definition set in order to even use AppleTV. If you don’t have one of these TVs, or don’t keep it in a room where you most often watch videos, AppleTV might not be right for you.
  • You have a large movie collection that isn’t in one of AppleTVs two supported formats. For years, video files have been popularized in all sorts of file formats – DiVX, MPEG-2, WMV, and various types of AVIs. AppleTV won’t play most of them, and it won’t play your DVDs, either. Assuming you live in a country where DVD ripping is legal – take one step back, American readers – you’ll most likely need to use special conversion tools and spend a couple of hours per DVD you want to convert into an AppleTV-optimized file. Do you really want to invest that time in this format? Counterpoint: The latest AppleTV variant on Apple’s H.264 video format offers nice, high resolutions, so maybe it’s the right time to start converting your movies – unless you need 5.1-channel surround sound.
  • You’re budgeting for another Apple purchase, like a Mac mini. With the $499 iPhone, new iPods, and full-fledged computers like the $599 Mac mini out there… you have plenty of other ways to spend your cash on Apple products. Many readers think the similarly wireless-ready, more powerful Mac mini offers a much better value for home AV users – it certainly offers more hard drive space and the ability to play back any video you may have, including digital files in any format. Counterpoint: Unless you’re planning to buy a 30GB iPod, nothing Apple’s releasing is going to be much less than a $299 AppleTV, and you’ll have to shell out a lot more for one of those fancy Mac minis.
  • You want to hold out for a version with higher resolution or more hard disk space. If it’s a good Apple product, the company always releases a better one later… and if it’s a bad product, it quietly disappears from store shelves. Even if you don’t like the current AppleTV, you’ll have to concede that an updated version is likely to eventually follow, with enough horsepower to support even better video quality, and/or store more content. As nice as the first-generation iPod was, most people would laugh at paying $399 today for its 5GB disk drive. Counterpoint: Apple could update some of Apple TV’s features in firmware, or release inexpensive add-ons to enhance its capabilities. Who’d be laughing then?

Hi Chris, I’ve been subscribed to your Youtube channel for a few months, and had just watched your AppleTV video. You brought up watching Youtube videos on the AppleTV, and how Ponzi would rather watch the videos on her TV. The Wii’s Opera browser actually works very well with Youtube videos, so you could watch full-screen videos on your TV without buying a fancy apple product. It may be just a web browser, but a few people overlook their ability to watch videos from the internet on a screen bigger than their monitor.

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