Product Review: The New Apple TV
We’re big Apple TV fans here at Casa Verde. We have three of the old models, one for each TV. Sure, they get too hot and lose their iTunes streaming connections way too often, but they make it easy to sort through our ripped and purchased collection of movies and TV shows. And at about 3,000 TV episodes and nearly 1,400 movies (yes, I have my own private Netflix), it’s important to be able to get to what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
So I ordered one of the new models from Amazon and my initial impression is: One step forward, two steps back.
The pros: Tiny, won’t overheat, rock solid wifi connection, responds to the remote control very snappily — like mind-reading fast. Love the Netflix connection. Great for iTunes rentals. Super easy to set up. And the aluminum remote is a delight to hold, even if I still hate the duplicated Select button.
The cons: Using the goddamn thing.
The original Apple TV was a stripped-down Mac with a hard drive and everything. So when it loaded up your media library, it stayed loaded until you exited or rebooted. With our massive library, it took about two minutes to load all the info wirelessly, but at least you didn’t have to wait through that again for a few days.
The new Apple TV is a stripped down iPad. And with only 8 gigabytes of memory on board, cruising through your movie genre folders is one endless “Loading Media Library” message after another. It’s essentially unusable for family that owns lots of media.
Sorting through TV shows is another disaster. Previously, each TV show was a folder. Use the remote to select the folder and Apple TV would take you automatically to the oldest unwatched show. Or to the oldest show, if none had been watched. New Apple TV displays each and every season of each and every show as its own folder. So if I want to scroll down to watch the latest Justified, instead of scrolling past about 40 shows, I now have to scroll past 119 seasons of shows. And then wait for the “Loading Media Library” rigamarole to finish as it gathers the info for the Justified folder. And, no, you can’t change the sort options.
Unacceptable.
Oh, and a nitpick. The indicator light on the front of the unit flashes to confirm remote control clicks. But either the light is too bright or the contrast with the black of the unit is too high, so it catches your eye every time you click. For a company which prides itself on staying out of the users way, that little light is a distinctly non-Apple like distraction.
If the TV sorting and indicator lights were the only problems, I’d keep mine and wait for the inevitable software update. But that 8GB of memory is an unfixable hardware limitation — and it makes it unbearable to get to what you want to see.
Verdict: Apple TV is great for streaming Netflix and iTunes rentals, but otherwise it’s a pretty epic fail.
I’m sending mine back.
Thanks for posting this. We use our 1st Gen AppleTV pretty much the same way (except that they only thing we load on it are our pictures, everything else streams from the Dual G5 tower in the basement).
I was very worried about the changes. The other change is that we sit around as a family and listen to music and explore artists in the Music store. I see that you can’t buy music anymore on the new one (well, can’t “buy” anything, only rent).
So you have basically just confirmed my fears about the new one, and I will just live with the one that I have.
Roku. Accept no substitute.
The light would be easy enough to fix (a little paint or the like), but the UI issues, not so much.
Frank: Will the Roku even stream local video content? Everything I can find about it suggests it won’t, which makes it even worse for Mr. Green’s needs.
I think it’s safe to say (based on the design of ITunes) that Apple simply doesn’t care about the problems of trying to manage large content libraries with it’s systems. This is sad, and I don’t know of anyone who does better, but that seems to be the state of the world.
Based on your description, I won’t be getting the new AppleTV. We stream our video library (about as large as yours) from an old desktop Mac we’ve got sitting around to an original model AppleTV. Good enough, and occasionally there will be something on the Apple store worth renting. Eventually someone will make a box that fits our needs better, but it sounds like we’re not there yet.
Oh, and it goes without saying, but JUSTIFIED ROOLS!!!1!
I just got my Roku box yesterday. It has a USB port in the side, so I’d wager that it can be hooked to you computer to stream content. I haven’t had time to try it yet.
Two notes:
1) Apple TV still doesn’t do 1080p. Hello, the 20th century called and wants its HDTV standards compliance back.
2) Out of curiosity, just as a test – have you tried having it read your library over a wired connection rather than wireless? There’s a significant difference in speed. It would be interesting to know whether the bottleneck is your network or your media server.
http://shop.roku.com/Roku-Streaming-Player-Options-W5.aspx
Ive never used the local streaming, but I think the new XD/S version has it.
I dont know anyone who has one who doesnt like it. Mine was gift that I was certain was not going to be that useful, but I now can see that with a Roku I can actually see getting rid of my other provider.
Download the remote control app to your iPAD. The keyboard simplifies searching and it coordinates media stores with the Apple TV.
JLW III