I have always been amazed that Apple has historically announced all its new consumer products at one major event each year.
You're bombarded with information about 20 new products in a two-hour keynote address and an hour later everyone has forgotten most of them. Apple has finally figured this out - sort of. At this year's MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, the company announced only two products and most people were so overwhelmed by one - the fancy iPhone - that the other - the Apple TV - got little, if any, press.
Actually, the company has three new products but the third - a new AirPort Extreme Base Station featuring the ultra -high-speed 'n' upgrade to the 802.11 wireless networking protocol - wasn't even mentioned. There was just a press release slipped in among the many others I received that day. No new Macs, no new software, no new operating system; just a telephone and a connection for your TV to play iTunes content and another gadget so it could do this wirelessly. Sigh. I know it's not smart for Apple to waste its press bandwidth but, frankly, I'd prefer to see 20 new products announced in a two-hour address.
So, sometime in February, Apple will ship the Apple TV set-top box for US$299 and you will be able to purchase and download movies, TV shows, music and other iTunes Music Store booty to a hard drive dedicated to this purpose, all of which can be played on your widescreen TV. However, I'm not exactly thrilled with this new product. Perhaps I'm spoiled but I expect Apple's latest and greatest gadget to be as elegant and problem-solving as its others.
Here's my gripes. First, the Apple TV is not full High Definition 1080i. While it will play content on those TVs, it sends only a 720p signal, making the movies and TV shows less dramatic than they could be. Second, it's a virtual shopping cart for which I pay the electricity. I buy it so they can sell me stuff. Hmm. I know I'm cheap and I know this is the successful iPod/iTunes business model, but if they sold it for US$100 I'd close my eyes and play their game. Third, you have to have an ethernet cable near your TV for it to work. Either that or you have to purchase one of the new AirPort Extreme Base Stations so you can wirelessly send iTunes material from your computer to the Apple TV and connect the TV to the internet iTunes store.
The new AirPort Extreme Base Station costs US$179 and is fantastically fast but if you have to use it as a router to connect your other computers to the internet, it only supports 10/100 base-T ethernet, a standard that is 1/10th the speed of modern Mac networking. This problem can be solved with a gigabit router from another manufacturer but that will cost another US$100.
