I had high hopes when Steve Jobs said
"We listened to our customers."
I should have known then that the snake oil was
being opened to spread over my eyes.
Apple announced yesterday at their September 1st event
many new things : a new version of iTunes,
a preview of IOS 4.1 and 4.2 for the iPhone.
But there were only two things I wanted to see:
New iPods and ( hopefully) an Apple TV that works
much, much better than the original.
Well, I didn't hold my breath on the iPod
( The Ipod Classic 160GB
is and looks like for memy last iPod purchase ever, as no one seems to
believe that people want a large capacity
iPod Touch. Go figure), but I had high hopes
for an Apple TV.
I bought one
when they first came out ( well, to tell the truth after the first revision
of the 1.0 version, as I always buy my Apple products
refurbished. If you don't know why, read about it here.)
2 years ago, and returned it within 2 days.
Because it only took me one day to see how
limiting the device was to my environment.
All of the content ( and I have a lot of content)
would have to be re-converted to .m4v format for the Apple TV.
And all that content would have to be synced to the Apple TV to play.
And my Apple TV had limited storage. You get the idea.
It was a worthless device to me.
Fast Forward to Now:
the Western Digital HD Media Player
is everything an all-in-one media playing device should be:
1. It's not linmited to strictly "iTunes friendly formats",
able to handle DIVX, XVID, MKV, and OGG. 2. It's expandable,
you can either just stream media from a dedicated server
in your house, or you can hook up any size USB drive x 2
to the device to give it local storage. And it outputs in
1080i to your tv.
The one drawback of the device is that it's menu interface,
while not the worst, isn't as elegant as Front Row on the
Mac. And it's footprint on the living room entertainment
center is, with two USB drives, the length of a decent DVD player.
So I was really hoping that Apple would get the new
Apple TV 2 right this time, and as Steve Jobs read off
the list of customer concerns, he seemed to hint that
he was going to address some of my concerns.
Nope, Nope, and again nope. The new Apple TV 2 still
doesn't handle anything that isn't "iTunes friendly".
They stripped out the storage, & cut the resolution
to 720p. The only good thing about the device is they
lowered the price to be competitive to the WD HD Live,
which as I check on Amazon.com this morning, has
been lowered to within $1 less than the Apple TV 2
.Someone at Apple didn't pay attention or has their own agenda.
I don't know which is worse.
Don't get me wrong. Apple will still get my money
for a new iMac sometime soon. But the product
I REALLY, REALLY wanted to buy, well...that money
will go to Western Digital ( via amazon.com).
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