“I got [my Apple TV] last week and noted that the design of the object itself was somewhat enigmatic. If someone were to encounter the device cold, there’d be no idea what it was or could do. It’s a fairly flat tray, seven inches wide and long, slightly over an inch high. It weighs just less than two and a half pounds. There are no buttons, no switches, not even an on-off toggle. (In this it is almost an apotheosis of Apple’s belief that less equals more in these matters.) On the back are the sockets for cables and electronics connectors. If it didn’t have the familiar fruit logo and the letters ‘TV’ on top, you might conceivably use it to as a tray to hold an order of sushi at a chic fusion-cuisine joint,” Steven Levy writes for Newsweek.
Levy writes, “The crisp list of menus and the straightforward means of navigating them will be familiar to anyone who has used the Apple remote with the Front Row feature on recent Macintosh computers, or even stepped through the menu options on an iPod. What’s more, it’s a visually rich experience with clean text on black background enhanced by high-definition movie posters, album covers and your own photos.”
“A lot of people will use Apple TV as a way to listen to their iTunes music in the living room, and the system shines at this… Ideally, everything you watch on a high-definition set is high-def, but the movies and television shows on your iTunes collection run in “near-DVD” quality. Perfectly acceptable, but still… It’s easy to pick selected photo albums and watch gorgeous slide shows on your television. Unfortunately, at this point you can only show photos that are synced to the Apple TV—no streaming yet from other computers… Apple should build this in as quickly as possible,” Levy writes.
Levy writes, “Apple TV effectively liberates your digital songs, videos and photos from your computer, allowing them moments of glory on your widescreen television. If you have a big iTunes collection, a big television and even a medium-sized entertainment budget, you’ll probably get your money’s worth from Apple TV.”
Much more in the full article here.
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