Apple TV MC572LL/A Price Review

The sleek new Apple TV is small in size but big on entertainment. Rent from the biggest selection of HD movies or rent TV shows in HD, commercial free. Stream directly from the big catalog of Netflix titles. Watch your beloved YouTube videos. And enjoy music and photos from your home computer on your home theater system. All you need is a single HDMI cable to set it up. Stream HD movies and TV shows from iTunes plus content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and MobileMe (see bigger image).

1,659 of 1,724 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Video Review: Apple TV, so much for so little, October 10, 2010
By D. Bowman “Tech Dork” (LA, CA) See all my reviews
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This is an amazing compliment to your home theater.
So many features, still so easy to use.
My seven year old son has it all figured out.

I hope you enjoy the video.
Let me know what you think.

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496 of 529 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Apple TV Good Now, possible to be Great, October 15, 2010
By Just Another Geek “vikast” (Simi Valley, CA, USA) See all my reviews This review is from: Apple TV MC572LL/A (NEWEST VERSION) (Electronics) I’m not an Apple Afficianodo. I do not wear jeans and black turtlenecks in reverence to Steve Jobs. I do not hang out at the Apple Store and covet becoming a “genius”; but, I have to give credit where credit is due. The last not many merchandise Apple has brought out the iPod, iPhone, iPad have been unbelievable and changed the buyer electronics and media / software landscape. Apple TV is located to do the same, but it’ll take many more time to completely realize the possible of this device.

Apple TV effectively lets you to stream whatever is on your iTunes to your TV and home theater system. Moreover, it has fitted support for Netflix, You Tube and some other internet established media content providers. The picture quality and performance for these services are worth the price of admission. There’s important possible to advance the platform just give it many time.

System Overview: My Apple TV is plugged into a 60 inch Samsung 1080p LED HDTV via HDMI (video) and a Yamaha Home Theater Receiver via Toslink optical cable (audio). I have AT&T Uverse with their 802.11g Residential Gateway (combination of DSL modem and wireless router) with their Elite DSL service (6 MB per second). ITunes runs on a Dell Desktop with 4GB of memory, Intel Core two Duo processor and 500 GB Hard Drive operating on Windows Vista (64 bit) and secured with Norton 360 (firewall, antivirus, etc.). The network handles the Desktop, two iPhones, a Blackberry, an iPad, the Apple TV, four Laptops, a wireless Printer and a networked wired printer. The Computer / Residential Gateway are in the Den and the TV / Home Theater / Apple TV are in the family room. The two rooms are about 100 feet separately and are separated by five walls.

Set Up: Easy as pie. It took five minutes to plug in the HDMI cable, the optical cable, the power outlet , then adding it to the wireless network. Sharing iTunes from my desktop to Apple TV took another 20 minutes, since I had to download the new variant of iTunes and restart my computer and Apple TV. Apple really makes it simple I did not have to make any modifications to my firewall settings to share iTunes on the desktop with Apple TV. I also downloaded the Apple Remote on my iPhone and iPad, which took another five minutes.

User Interface: Apple’s secret sauce is the simplicity of their merchandise. Apple TV is no different. The menu is simple Movies, TV, Internet, Computer and Settings. Movies and TV are for renting content directly from iTunes inside Apple TV. Internet gives you access to Netflix, You Tube, etc. Computer gives you access to iTunes on your computer. Settings lets you to change the different Apple TV alternatives. The remote control is Apple’s common model of minimalist efficiency, with a menu button, a play / pause button and an iPod like controller. The supplied remote works well with Apple TV, but is a bit cumbersome when one has to enter data (e.G., e mail addresses, search on YouTube or Netflix). A much better solution is downloading Apple Remote on your iPhone or iPad. It just turns the iPhone or iPad into a big touch pad that lets you to use gestures to control the Apple TV (e.G., swipe left, swipe right, double click, etc.). Moreover, it automatically gives a keyboard when one is asked for text input (e.G., for search). Apple remote is free on the App Store.

Netflix Streaming / Video Quality: Setting up Netflix was fast just just enter your e mail address / password and you are prepared to go. I watched many TV from BBC, a foreign flick and Iron Man. Each program loaded quickly less than 30 seconds. Picture quality was good to great, based on the source material. Picture quality was comparable to DVD for SD material(perhaps somewhat better), but somewhat less sharp than upconverted DVD or blue ray. HD Programming looked like the HD on demand programming through uVerse. There was enough of a buffer that there was no jittering, pixelation or stuttering on the streaming to the TV. Sound quality on the stream was good I do not think they stream in 5.1, so the video stream does not leverage the subwoofer. Considering that I am running a heavily taxed wireless system on 802.11g with a 100 foot distance between Apple TV and the Gateway, the picture quality and streaming performance are remarkable. Having this quality of Netflix compatibility is worth the price of admission by itself.

ITunes Streaming: I streamed many music from my Playlists from the Computer. Sound quality is good, but not great. My Yamaha CD Player sounds better, but it can only hold five cds. Having access to my complete library is useful, so you lose sound quality but get convenience. ITunes streams not only the music, but also the cover art. After some minutes, Apple TV switches into screensaver mode and starts transmitting pictures to the TV with the music. I also streamed many videos from my computer and the streaming was again flawless. One of the issues with Apple TV is that it only supports the Apple video standards, i.E., MP4. I had many DIVX files that I transformed over to MP4 by using DVD Fab and imported them into iTunes. If you have a library of AVI, Divx, Xvid, etc., this will require conversion of those files to stream from your computer.

ITunes from inside Apple TV: there’s access to an iTunes store inside Apple TV also. They have a different pricing structure, in that TV shows and movies are available for rent only. They have a restricted number of titles now mainly BBC, ABC (since Steve Jobs sits on their Board) and Fox. CBS and NBC aren’t on Apple TV. Movie selection is decent they have all the new movies. The Apple TV selection may be easily increased by just downloading the content you want from iTunes on your desktop , then streaming it to Apple TV.

YouTube Streaming: amazingly good. The HQ / HD You Tube pieces look remarkably crisp on the TV. The older content that was meant to watch on a small window on your computer looked a little pixelated, but satisfactory.

Apple has built a great platform with many of possible. With what is available now Apple TV is a pretty remarkable value at $99. It’s worth it just for the Netflix streaming and integration with iTunes. Since Apple TV is really built on the same hardware (at least the processing chip) as the iPhone and iPad and has the same operating system, I would not be surprised if there are “apps” that will sooner or later make it to Apple TV to more improve Apple TV (e.G., ABC Streaming, Games, on Demand, etc.). There’s supposed to be an upgrade to the operating system with a new variant of Airplay that comes out in November, 2010. This will let you to stream from an iPad or iPod to the Apple TV also.

I looked at other streaming devices (e.G., Roku, using my Panasonic Blue Ray for Netflix, etc.) and none of them had the simplicity and reliabilty that the Apple TV offers. The Wi Fi “stick” for my Blue Ray player is $80 anyway and the Netflix integration is not anywhere almost as robust as Apple TV. UVerse also has music and picture streaming fitted using Microsoft Media Center but, it obliged many network configuration and it crashes quite frequently. I did not buy a Roku, but a friend of mine has had some issues with streaming performance. At under $100, the Apple TV is competitively priced with other streaming alternatives. Now just bring on the “apps”.

Update on 4/1/11:

I’ve had the Apple TV for some months now and I still really like it. Apple has presented Airplay, which is worth mentioning as it has possible to be a gamechanger technology. Moreover, there was important activity on the “jailbreaking” front for the Apple TV.

Airplay is Apple’s system of transmitting video / audio wirelessly between matched devices. Apple TV, the iPhone and iPad are all Airplay matched. This has proven to be especially useful feature as I can stream videos from my iPad to the Apple TV and have them appear on my TV. As an example, I may have a digital copy of a movie on my iPad (perhaps bought through iTunes or came with a DVD purchase). Through Airplay, I can transmit the movie directly from my iPad to the Apple TV and watch the movie on my TV. Likewise, if a friend has an iPhone and we want to listen to their new music selection, we can stream their music from their iPhone straight to my stereo system through Airplay. The real gamechanger for Airplay is streaming video from websites onto my Apple TV so I can watch them on my TV. As an example, I may be on the TED web site and they have a video from a TED conference. I can stream the video straight to my Apple TV and watch the video on my TV’s 60 inch screen instead of the iPad’s ten inch screen. Some number of websites have already incorporated Airplay compatibility into their videos, like CNN and TED. I think Airplay is going to have an interesting adoption cycle conventional media businesses (e.G., TV Networks) most likely will not support Airplay since it goes against their business model. Other websites that rely on video for traffic (e.G., adult sites, news sites, blogs, etc.) will most likely adopt Airplay to get more traction with buyers.

According to Wikipedia, jailbreaking mentions “a procedure that lets devices running Apple’s iOS operating system to get full access to unlock all features of the said operating system, thus removing restrictions forced by Apple”. Once jailbroken, iOS users are able to load and run applications that aren’t available on the App Store. Jailbreaking a device isn’t illegal, much to Apple’s chagrin; but, it may void one’s warranty. I am not going into how to jailbreak and Apple TV just google “jailbreak Apple TV” for. Read more ›

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98 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars a great box for to get media from point A, B and C to your TV, October 2, 2010
By S. Miller (DC) See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) This review is from: Apple TV MC572LL/A (NEWEST VERSION) (Electronics) I looked forward to this product since it was declared early last month. I am happy I pulled the trigger and bought it when it became available. For $99 it gives most of the functionality I payed microsoft $50 a year for. I have become less reliant on the XBOX as a game machine, and more as a Netflix/Media Streamer since my family has grown, and not having to pay for XBOX Live was one of the driving reasons behind this buy. The reason I say “most of the functionality” is caused by it not having the codec support that the XBOX360 comes with out of the box. I have had no issues with playback of mp4 or m4v files, and I am happy with that, but it lacks support for WMV and AVI (as far as I have experienced). This is not exactly a deal breaker since I can re encode any content to supported codecs with handbrake and use iTunes to take care of my video library.

The UI is slick, the setup was somewhat easy (but could have been easier with keyboard support) and the capability to control music from my laptop and desktop is great (through iTunes via the now restricted “airplay” functionality).

I’m really happy with the YouTube, Flickr and Netflix support. They’re by far the best I have seen from a media center, but I can see certain parts being a ache if you use the included remote (there is no keyboard to speak of, and scrolling through letter to spell things out is a hassle). The remote app on iOS devices more than makes up for the lack of a keyboard since it gives added functionality (such as alpha numeric input, fast seeking and library browsing). I look forward to video support with airplay and will update this review once I get to play with that (in November?).

One last thing it is calm. The thing barely makes a peep.

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