Quarter Life Crisis

Shopping¶

819 words on Hardware

As a killer activity for my easter weekend home town visited I had scheduled a good old shopping spree with my friend Jean. As things go when guys go shopping this ended up in numerous record stores being visited which is cool because both the choice and price are better in Bremen than back in Göttingen. It also meant that – as usual – Jean ended up buying loads of albums, while I tried to be reasonable and only got two. The Myth Takes cover art rocks in full vinyl format, though! Tickets for yet another knock out at the Hurricane festival have been bought as well (Arcade Fire!).

In addition to other errands we had to run, Jean also had to walk by his favourite Apple dealer (apparently the same one I got the Ready for Mac mug from). It’s safe to say that just the fact that I introduced him to the Mac back in the mid 1990s has made quite a non-trivial impact on Apple’s sales. Not only is he much more the overspending type than I am, he also got pretty much all of his family and friends to buy Macs as well. And of course he absolutely had to get an Apple TV now that it is out. Particularly as he recently got a matching television set and we were facing the last one available in town.

That toy of course had to be tried out immediately. And while things look all sleek and shiny, the initial experience was mediocre. At best. I don’t know what exactly those supposedly professional ‘journalists’ do when they claim to test things. But it seems to be a safe bet that actually performing tests in situations that don’t exactly match those envisioned by Apple’s marketing people isn’t among the things they do.

So, yes, that Apple TV experience may be great if you happen to have a setup Apple likes. But even trivially missing that setup just led us into agony and made the post-unpacking experience distinctly non-fun.

To begin with, my friend doesn’t have a working internet connection in his new flat yet. So we just quickly plugged in the wireless base station to have a network around. But we did that after the Apple TV had gone to its network selection screen and the list of displayed networks there didn’t update automatically to display the newly created network. That’s quite lame and not what I expect from Apple. In the end we had to turn the Apple TV off and on again to actually see the newly created network rather than just the neighbours’ amusingly named networks.

The fact that in the various attempts to connect the device to the network my friend had to enter a 16 digit WPA key into the machine four times using the soddy remote didn’t raise anybody’s spirits either. And once that was done, the iTunes mess started. The Apple TV was seen alright (named ‘Apple TV’ in iTunes rather than ‘ TV’ as the packaging would suggest), but iTunes immediately started stalling and displaying nonsensical information about connecting to some ‘iTunes Store’ thing once the toy had been connected. Apparently iTunes was too dumb to realise there wasn’t any network connection. That was confusing at best – particularly with the AppleTV’s main setup ‘page’ in iTunes being hidden by an empty ‘iTunes Store’ page at times for reasons beyond our comprehension. Also it turned out later on that (unlike an iPod) the Apple TV would display but refuse to play iTMS bought songs without that contact to the iTunes Store having taken place. Not really good.

Of course with 40GB of music and some films (which iTunes doesn’t really recognise as such because they aren’t iTunes Store bought…) not all of the library would fit on the Apple TV. And also it is said that films will be synched first, then Podcasts and the music and finally the photos. (Can Apple TV access shared iPhoto libraries? We couldn’t access the one we had in the network.) I think that order is unfortunate at best. When trying to get a first impression, wouldn’t it be great to just have some photos or music around immediately rather than having to wait for some huge video-podcasts to sync over the slow wireless connection first? I think it would.

And after hundreds have been spent on another shiny Apple toy, my friend would have also preferred that. Because as things go it means that by the time his wife comes home the machine will still be synching some stuff that’s meaningless to her over to the Apple TV. If, however, her holiday photos were on there right away and she could browse them in a shiny interface on a high quality display, she might even like that new toy immediately rather than looking at it as yet another waste of money.

Just saying…

April 8, 2007, 1:22

Tagged as hardware.