Apple TV MB189LL/A with 160GB Hard Drive [OLD VERSION]
by Apple Computer
![Apple TV MB189LL/A with 160GB Hard Drive [OLD VERSION]](/images/Apple-TV-MB189LL-A-with-160GB-Hard-Drive-OLD-VERSION-B000RQHAUA-L.jpg)
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Our Price: $399.95 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $110.00 (click here) Category: Home Theater See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple TV MB189LL/A with 160GB Hard Drive [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: After Two Years of Use - A Swing and a Miss for Apple
Summary: 3 Stars
Firstly, I will admit here, I am a HUGE Apple fan. I truly love their products, own a lot of them, and am quite impressed and satisfied with most of them. At the top of my list of Apple disappointments, however, would be the AppleTV. In theory, it is a great concept... if only it performed as advertised. On the positive side, the AppleTV has great picture and sound quality, though you should note output is 1080i, not full 1080p. Not a big deal to me, but some purists might want to know. The user interface is easy to understand, and is attractive displayed on your HD flatscreen TV. However, there are a few too many major negatives for me to be able to wholeheartedly recommend this product. Here's a list of the negatives associated with the AppleTV after two years of use.
1) The interface is insufferably sluggiush and laggy at times. Especially when accessing a large music library or when syncing, this thing can be painfully slow to respond to your commands. You'll click a button and wait 20-30 seconds for a response from the unit. Not at all acceptable. Not one bit. This is my biggest complaint with the AppleTV.
2) It only performs as advertised if you have a small music library. If your music library is big, syncing your library to the AppleTV is incredibly, horribly, painfully slow and streaming your content isn't really an option because it takes forever to load all of the artist and track information for a big library. You're much better off syncing a small select playlist to your AppleTV for listening, but do NOT in any way expect to upload or stream a large music library. This thing just can think or communicate quickly enough to make it work well. The bigger your library, the more laggy it performs.
3) I can find no way to shut the gosh darn thing off. I think when it goes on "standby" it simply turns off the video output. The thing stays warm to the touch around the clock unless you pull the plug out of the wall. A power button is a very strange omission in my opinion.
4) It runs quite warm, with no internal fan for cooling. So, it is not suitable for use inside unvented or already hot a/v cabinets. You also can't stack anything on top of it or I think it's bound to overheat.
All in all, if all you are doing is streaming from the internet and syncing a small music library - this might work for you. But in my book, this is the only Apple product I regret purchasing. I would wait until the next generation of Apple TV is released, with more RAM, and a better design. Two years on now, the new version can't be too far behind.
Customer Review: It's Two Devices In One
Summary: 5 Stars
Apple really needs to advertise and explain this thing better. It's an awesome device that does many things, but it's easier to understand it if you think of it really having only two distinct functions:
1) It's for renting HD movies. Give that new HD TV something to make it shine. Sure Blu-ray has won the format war, but what format war is next? Skip the wars and just stream the video. No clutter of DVDs and players to buy. Yes the selection is small now (it just started a month ago) but it will soon build up to include newer movies as they are released. Beware of old movies being released as HD. Renting "Blazing Saddles" in HD is not going to impress you. So, the only REAL new HD movies are the ones in theaters now and will soon be released for rental. We actually kept our Netflix account for renting the bulk of the older movies and TV shows we still like. Renting an HD movie for $5 is a cheap night of entertainment. I have a 6.0 Mbps internet connection and the HD movies are ready to play in about 1-2 minutes. You watch the movie as the rest of it downloads. I never had it stutter during playback.
2) It's an iPod for your TV. If you use iTunes and have photos, music, and home movies, this makes it easy to view them on your TV. I made my last vacation video in HD by using Final Cut Express and exporting it in the Apple TV format. Just drop that movie into iTunes and it will sync with the Apple TV. Viewing the still shots in HD is really amazing. Being like an iPod, Apple TV only shows content that you already have in iTunes. Don't think of it as some kind of backup drive for your music or movies.
Sure it does some other stuff like watching You Tube, but if the top two features are what you need, then this is for you. The simple "spouse friendly" remote is great too. My wife can now easily play our music collection without my computer being on.
ps: I bought the "take one" version of Apple TV. All I had to do was run the firmware updater and mine is now the same as the Take Two version (5.1 sound and all). The old and new Apple TV's have the same hardware.
One last thing - rentals are paid through the iTunes store so you can use iTunes gift cards to pay for movies!
Enjoy!
PS - one more reason - the $0.99 movie of the week. Apple has started offering a $0.99 movie rental each week. We've had Escape from Alcatraz, The ghost and the darkness, The Dead Zone and others. Not blockbusters, but certainly worth $0.99 and gets you used to the renting experience in an easy way.
Customer Review: Does Not Deserve to Wear the Apple Logo
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm an Apple fan. I have owned two desktops, an Airport, four iPods, and and iPhone. This product is just not ready for prime time. But it makes a really nice, warm, $300 doorstop.
Here's my setup, DSL line to Airport base station, over wireless, to Apple TV. (Note: I later added a Cat 5 wire between the Airport and the Apple TV, and performance only improved marginally.)
1. Movie Rental Scheme Makes No Sense - If you want to rent an HD movie it takes about 5 hours to download. Then you've got 30 days to start watching it. Once you start watching a two hour movie you have to finish within 24 hours. We have a toddler. Those blocks of time are not likely to line up in our lives for at least 15 years. It just doesn't make any sense. The only real knock on the Apple TV here is the 5 hours it takes to download. Apple pitched it as something you could start watching right away. That just hasn't been my experience.
2. Only 780p, not 1080p -- If I'm going to drop $300 on a consumer electronics device, it should perform at the current gold standard.
3. It gets hot -- As many others noted, the unit gets very warm. I was afraid to leave the stereo cabinet doors closed for risk of fire.
4. The Remote is Lame -- Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling . . . keep that thumb scrolling. Too many menu choices for such a limited remote. It takes many many clicks to get where you're going.
5. Latency -- It's like a bad cell phone or PDA. If you push a button and it is busy doing something, it just sits there. No acknowledgment, no little hourglass, just sits there. I had to wait up to a few minutes for remote clicks to be processed. I routinely waited 10-30 seconds for clicks to process.
6. Long Waits for Content -- If you want to watch HD content, it does NOT start playing right away. You have to wait between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 times the length of the content before you can start watching.
Contrast all of this above with a Blu-Ray DVD player. The player is about the same price. The content costs about the same. There's no latency. There's no waiting for downloads. The images are full 1080p.
The one good thing about the Apple TV, HD Podcasts. We loved the NASA podcasts of space imagery and underwater diving podcasts.
Final word, way too expensive for what it does. We returned it after 3 weeks.
Customer Review: Does just an ok job at playing music videos.
Summary: 3 Stars
I mainly like using the Apple TV to play music videos. I love to reminisce over the videos I watched growing up, generally in the early 90s, when MTV was still good. I think that was their golden era and they never play any of that material any more. So I am glad that there is now a way to watch it again.
iTunes provides a very limited selection of music videos. I usually can only find about 25% of what I am looking for. It is not too uncommon for a band with 10 or 20 music videos to have only 2 or so available for purchase at the store.
You never know what kind of quality you are going to get when you purchase a video until after you buy it. Many videos are only made to look good on a little iPod screen and can look very bad when viewed from a 40" TV. I even notice the lack of quality when I view them from my 20" computer monitor. It is unfair that iTunes is putting out great looking HD movies and HD TV shows and then putting out all these music videos that look crummy on large screen.
It's a shame since I downloaded a lot of really nice looking videos that are ruined by the fact that the quality of the video is blurry or pixelated. Apple TV has been out for 3 years now, what is the hold up getting some HD music videos out there and a larger selection?
As far as the positives I like Apple TVs minimalist approach. The very simple remote is a refreshing changing. Keeping the casing small is nice so that it is easy to carry around. There needs to be MUCH larger storage space (perhaps a way to plug an external drive into the Apple TV's USB port.) The drive inside the Apple TV should really be about 500GB - 1TB. Even as a very casual TV watcher (I don't even own a TV myself) I filled up a third of the device without even trying.
The experience of renting movies is sort of lame. I have really got used to renting movies for a week at the video store. Rentals on Apple give you a measly day. Sometimes I like to go over a part of a movie a couple days after I watch it. It takes much of the enjoyment out of it this way.
Once these issues are addressed I believe that downloading video to these kind of devices will one day be huge. I think it is like mp3 players. When mp3 players first came out their sales where modest and then after the rough edges where smoothed out sales exploded. I see that happening with the Apple TV.
Customer Review: Electronic library refresh
Summary: 5 Stars
The ATV is a huge IPod interfaced with your TV and audio system. The ATV has a lot of untapped potential in the area of internet connectivity. Hopefully Apple can make this available to the user in future upgrades or updates. The ATV provides a great platform for taking your movies, photos and music otherwise appreciated by a single user on a computer to the entertainment environment of your home. Great entertainment is had as memories flash back watching the photo album screen saver. Also, for those large collectors of CD music the ATV un-taps the depth and breadth of your collection in a single location. Saving you the hassle of physically searching your CD racks for a particular piece of music. Don't worry about space on the ATV, you will be challenged to fill the 160Gb with music alone. Movie buffs will quickly fill the 160Gb and will be faced with choosing what to keep on the ATV.
If you are new to the digital media world or haven't taken great care in the past to build you media library carefully, you will experience several long hours building or fixing your media library for the ATV. If un-hacked, the ATV conditionally requires the use of iTunes. For those Apple natives this is not a great deal when embracing the ATV. However, PC natives like myself will curse that they didn't record all their music in the universal MP3 format and will be required to convert all WMA files to the apple format (not MP3). Furthermore to make your library make any sense on the ATV, you will need to spend time fixing the structure of your library, like correcting genres, album names, artists names and the painful album artwork which doesn't exist for many of the non mainstream media (particularly classical) etc. From my experience it is best practice for the purposes of quality and consistency to rerip all of your CDs to the universal MP3 format using iTunes and let iTunes manage your media library applying the correct titles and album artwork automatically. Once up and running the ATV will show you the real potential of the digital media world in your home. Keep up the good work Apple!
If you need any detailed info on the ATV, visit: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org you will find many interesting articles although aimed at Apple natives not PC.