Apple TV¶
1666 words on Hardware , Mac OS X
A few more notes on the new Apple TV toy now that it starts shipping.
AppleTV and me
That is of course the most practically relevant question for me and influences my perspective. It’s short answer is No
. I don’t have a TV in my room. And the newest TV I have access to is about twenty years old (grandma’s good old Telefunken if you must know). While it has the tacky charme of 1980s fake wooden plastic surfaces it is quite large and is perfectly capable of displaying moving images. A DVD player, VCR, MacBook and C-64 supercomputer can be attached to it – though not all at once and when it’s in a good mood it will even display teletext. The only problem about it is that despite excessive attempts to do so, nobody managed to figure out how to re-order the different channels and the instruction manual can’t be found.
In short, just from a technical point of view, I am not in the market for an Apple TV gadget because I couldn’t connect it to anything. In addition, my interest in television isn’t big enough to justify spending non-trivial amounts of money into buying a ‘HD’ machine. In fact, we are discussing to just cancel our cable TV subscription because most of the 30 channels we pay for are brain damaging crap.
And still, after reading a number of comments on the Apple TV of early adopters and ambitious geeks, I start to think it is an interesting toy.
Paper form
I don’t know much about home entertainment devices. But I’d say that just by its specs the Apple TV doesn’t look to impressive in terms of what it can do: Play music from computers in the network, play films from computers in the network, do slideshows with photos from computers in the network – in case each of them is in an Apple approved format, that is.
Sure – all this is neat and I’m sure the interface for it will be pretty and work reasonably well if you limit yourself to small collections of songs, playlists, videos and photo albums. Already for larger numbers of those I expect navigation to be painful with Apple’s remote control. But the question is whehter this will be worth €300. Even when charging myself a fiver for each time I hook up the MacBook which can do the same – and more – up to the telly, it will take a while until the Apple TV is ‘worth it’. Particularly as it will not replace the DVD player and plugging the iPod into the stereo is rather simple.
The Innards
People have been quick to open their Apple TV devices and have a look what’s in there. I seems to have been clear to everybody but me that they’d find some bog-standard Intel CPU, a nice graphics chip and what looks like a pretty standard copy of MacOS X in there. (Oh, and the power supply which is neatly built into the case – I hope it doesn’t use much power in standby mode.) And that, I think, is very interesting and encouraging. It suggests that switching to OS X and Intel is really paying off for Apple in a very wide area.
To me it also suggests that OS X is good and adaptable enough to run on such specialised devices. Which, I imagine, isn’t just a good sign for the development of the OS but should also make the Apple TV relatively easy and cheap to implement for Apple. And all that while maintaining a well tested road to updates and new features.
It also means that the system is relatively open for third party hacking. And people are making progress at a good pace. While Apple’s default cofiguration of the Apple TV isn’t particularly appealing, this shows that – technically – making it do pretty much everything you can come up with is within reach.
Playing media files that aren’t officially Apple sanctioned should be doable thanks to QuickTime plugins or applications like VLC. Similarly the Apple TV should easily be able to double as a small home server for your files or possibly as a low-power machine for remote access. From what I have read you can all these things today if you are willing to open the machine and manipulate its hard drive with another machine.
And people are working hard – with first steps towards success as it seems towards putting that USB port to good use. And there are many good uses that come to mind. From charging and synching iPods, to attaching other drives, to an eyeTV, to a camera, to a keyboard and mouse. The possibilites seem to be countless.
Dream on!
Of course all this depends a bit on Apple. At the current state the Apple TV doesn’t support any of that. And Apple doesn’t have a history of being particularly open minded about other people fiddling with their products. On the other hand, it appears that they didn’t really try hard to keep people from tinkering, so perhaps there is hope.
And with my fantasy running wild, many ideas pop up for things that seem like they should be within reach of the Apple TV’s hardware with just its setup keeping them from becoming a reality:
- The obvious keyboard and mouse combination. If people have high definition TVs, those should be good enough to let people do things like check their mail, look stuff up in Wikipedia, ‘go’ to a place in Google Earth, surf the web or do an IM chat. The sort of things you sometimes want to do in the living room but for which you don’t want to have a computer around.
- With the addition of a microphone and camera there could even be AV Chats.
- A better remote with a scroll wheel or something that lets you handle long lists of artists.
- Drives. Of course you may need more storage space for your Apple TV with an extra hard drive. Or you may want to add a DVD drive. Or possibly a HD-DVD/Blueray drive in the future.
- Photos. Hook up your camera to the Apple TV and it will download your photos and make sure you find them in iPhoto the next time you use your actual computer.
- Games. People say the graphics chip in the Apple TV isn’t the worst, so some simple games should be possible. That Wii thing seems to be a great success. And the Apple TV hardware sounds like it’s close to matching it. But I assume you’ll find more Cocoa programmers than people familiar with some game console.
- Server. Most server tasks that people want at home are lightweight. The Apple TV should be easily able to handle that. A remote login perhaps, a web server, and a file server of course. Particularly the latter could come handy when in a household with several portable computers where you sometimes want to leave files for someone else.
- iPods. The iPod is more a living room device than an office device. Yet, you have to attach it to the computer to charge it and copy songs to it. I assume that charging might work on the Apple TV even as it ships. But it’d be great if you could just drop your iPod next to your telly when you come home and it is freshly charged and synched when you leave the next time. With the Apple TV figuring out which iTunes the iPod belongs to and Doing The Right Thing™.
- Media Library. As soon as you think along this line, you will remember how things start being a bit uncomfortable with iTunes once there are several computers, several people and shared songs. With computer music going mainstream the time for a media library may be close. What if iTunes had the option to not store your music locally but to use an Apple TV as its library? And that with full write access and importing abilities for you. And with your new songs also being available to the rest of the house.
- Backups. Once you have that precious media library you will need a lot of space to store it. And probably you will want a backup to go with that. For that I envision the ‘Apple TV Cube’, a cuboidal version of the device holding four large hard drives or whatever fits in there that the Apple TV can use. Depending on the noise level of that it might need a long cable though. And with X.5 coming along, the Apple TV will be your local network Time Machine server as well of course.
Conclusion
All right, I admit that I don’t expect to see most (or even any) of these in the Apple TV. At least not now. The current Apple TV with just 256MB of RAM and yesteryear’s processor may be a bit to handle some of those tasks – or all of them at the same time – with ease. And Apple has a newly introduced Airport base station and a popular little Mac mini the sales of which such a fully featured Apple TV could cannibalise. (In fact, I’d argue that the current situation where the Mac mini has a rather unnecessary DVD drive and the media centred Apple TV hasn’t seems slightly absurd.)
However – and that I think is the crucial point – the Apple TV as we have it today seems terribly close to be a viable replacement for many other devices. And I assume that thanks to using standard components and Mac OS X Apple should be able to move into any of those directions with ease when releasing the next revision of the hardware – or even by releasing a software update.
Let’s hope they will use this for the benefit of their users rather than just to pressure other electronics companies by threatening to take over some of their market. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
