Apple TV: New vs. Old

Recently Apple launched its new Apple TV for the amazingly low price of 99 USD (75 EUR / 1865 Kč). The previous Apple TV was considerably more, depending on the amount of storage you wanted. But, that's no longer an issue with the lastest Apple TV, because they no longer include ANY storage, so now you don't have to pick. ;-)

I could list the plethora of differences between the "old" (and my opinion) Apple TV and the new one, but the fine people over at Digital Trends have done a pretty good job comparing the New Apple TV vs. Old Apple TV.

What I will say is this -- cloud computing (ie... all of your hard drive storage is on the internets, not on your local computer) overall is pretty cool and I'm definitely not a cloud computing hater. I like it. But, Apple TV's new "stream only" approach is kinda limiting in some ways. What if I want to buy a movie? I can still buy movies on the old Apple TV ... and even via iTunes on my PC. But I cannot do it directly via the new Apple TV. I can only rent. This means I have to go into my office, turn on my computer, fire up iTunes, BUY a movie ... download it in total, and THEN! I can stream it from my PC to my new Apple TV and watch it in my living room on the large LCD TV ... seems like a longer process just to watch a movie (more steps in the revenue cycle, I think, aren't usually wise). Doesn't look like I can lug the new one to my mountain cottage either to watch movies (would need an internet connection to watch movies). I guess the limited internet connection mountain cottage types aren't their target market.

On the other hand, it removes some of the craziness of "syncing" content between systems (I mistakenly deleted a purchased movie off of my iTunes on my PC, and it then "synced" (deleted) on my Apple TV, so I lost the movie I purchased) ... so from this side I think it's cool. The netflicks integration seems pretty cool tool.

All in all, still a pretty cool device with very limited competition ... but, with a 99 dollar price tag, I think Apple TV is really going to cross the market place chasm now ... just wait and see. But I don't think they needed to remove some of the cool stuff they had before ... they could have just improved what they had, instead of cleaning the slate so to speak.

Mobile Slingbox Chill'axing ...

Well, last week I was in the UK on a biz trip, and I did a sweet impulse buy of a Slingbox SOLO at the airport (Terminal 5, despite all of its glitches and its over-price construction costs, it certainly has enough gadget stores in it for the likes of me!). In case you've forgotten what a Slingbox is, it basically is a stand-alone TV server that "slings" (hence its name, clever eh?) or pushes out your home TV connection out to the internets -- and you pick the signal up with a software TV client (on your notebook desktop pc, or mobile device). It works really really well. I watch my Dad's TV back in the states on it from time-to-time. I picked one up mainly so my girlfriend's sister can watch Czech TV while she's abroad (they don't sell the Slingbox here in the Czech Republic, go figure...).

At any rate, the other obvious reason I picked one up is because Sling viewing on my Nokia N95 is *really* good. I mean, REALLY good. It looks super clear and the audio comes in great (*** only via Wi-Fi-- EDGE just isn't fast enough for Sling viewing). Most modern shopping malls in the CZ have free Wi-Fi, so at lunch I'm usually watching the news on my mobile -- and people freak out when they see TV (full screen) on my phone. Even my colleagues who sport iPhones drool at the fact they can't do that (Apple, make a deal with Slingbox to get their client on your new 3G iPhone -- that would be yet another selling point for me to get an iPhone). Check out which devices are currently supported for mobile Slingbox viewing ... (30-day free trial)

Anyway, enough of the rambling -- I have some Slingbox TV to get viewing ...