At the beginning of this week my family and I left the TV stone ages. We got a big, honking new flat-screen TV, relegated our enormous old beast TV to a bedroom. We also got Apple TV, which is our first-ever set-top box of any kind. At this point, we’re all still compete newbs […]
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Apple TV – Some Very Early Impressions

Nov 12th 2010 by

RemoteandAppleTV

 

At the beginning of this week my family and I left the TV stone ages. We got a big, honking new flat-screen TV, relegated our enormous old beast TV to a bedroom. We also got Apple TV, which is our first-ever set-top box of any kind.

At this point, we’re all still compete newbs when it comes to all of this. Even so, I’ve been looking forward to using Apple TV for some time now, and I thought I’d share a few very quick rookie type thoughts about our first few days with it.

So here goes – some very early Apple TV impressions and notes:

Setup

— Basic setup (just getting Apple TV connected and working /showing up on the TV) was fairly easy. The setup guide included with the Apple TV was minimalist but still relatively helpful. It probably took us a few minutes longer than most to get the basics going, as we have just never messed with any sort of set-top box before.

It was still only a few minutes to get that part done and move onto iTunes account configuration. This section was even easier – just keying in iTunes account login details and giving it our network key.

Overall, we were up, connected to the network and iTunes, and browsing movies and TV shows within under ten minutes. Not bad considering what novices my wife and I are.

Good Points

— Coming from years of just basic cable channels, the range of movie, video and TV show content we can access via Apple TV is great. We recently signed up for a Netflix account in anticipation of our new TV setup – so we can now rent and stream movies from there as well as from iTunes. iTunes also offers TV shows of course, and YouTube is easily accessible as well. I’m very happy to see that BBC America offers up some old Blackadder and Young Ones episodes.

— It’s also easy to setup access to MobileMe and Flickr if you have accounts.

— I love all the ‘personal’ content I can get to via Home Sharing to the Apple TV. We can throw photos up on the big screen without messing with component cables and such. And my very favorite thing is that Home Sharing gives access to our full music library. I work at home most of the time, so during the day the TV is now serving as a stereo – and one that I can control via the Remote app on my iPad and iPhone.

— AirPlay looks like it will be cool when it is fully working. At the moment, running the iOS gold master build on my iPad, I can see its icon and use it in some apps that support it – but it only streams audio over to the TV right now, no video. I believe the Apple TV itself needs an update before this will work – I’m looking forward to that.

Not So Good Points

— Of all the Apple products I’ve used, Apple TV is the least solid in its performance thus far. It has displayed a few relatively minor but irritating issues over our first few days of use, such as:

Its remote control is very temperamental in terms of line of sight – much more so than any of our other TV remotes, with the same set of obstacles / same line of sight. The responsiveness when doing things with the remote is also quite poor at times – we often have to hit the same button several times over to get it to respond.

There’s sporadic but relatively frequent lag during some operations. Choosing menu items and navigating through menus and menu items can be quite slow at times when this occurs.

The worst issue I’ve seen is that Apple TV keeps ‘forgetting’ that I have already setup Home Sharing on my MacBook Pro.  When I go to access it, it prompts that I need to turn it on in iTunes, when it has been on for months and when the TV was just recognizing it earlier the same day – even when the MacBook Pro is on, not in sleep mode, and iTunes is open.

So far the fix is just to turn Home Sharing off and back on, but that’s still a pain, as it requires my iTunes password each time to turn it back on.

Overall

Coming from nothing but basic cable, Apple TV is a huge upgrade for us – lots of great content lots of cool features to mess around with, and Home Sharing and AirPlay should both be great fun to use.

It has surprised me how flaky the performance is so far though. I hope some of it may be due to novice user error and that some of it may be improved with updates to Apple TV.

What are your thoughts on Apple TV? How has your experience with it been so far?

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