Loving Apple TV
In today's Kool-Aid drinking exercise, I have to say that I really like the Apple TV. I bought it yesterday at my local Apple Store.
Scoble likes it too. What's fun about his post is the comments that follow. There is one post in particular that summarizes exactly the way I feel about it. If you look at the box like an iPod that syncs wirelessly to iTunes, uses your stereo instead of headphones, and your TV instead of its own screen, then you understand exactly what it's used for. And relative to the cost of an iPod, it's a pretty solid value. Like the iPod, it "just works."
As is the case with everything that Apple has done in the digital media space, the idea is to think of the most simple way to make things works. They already had a pretty good model in place for this when they launched the iPod, and the same paradigm works pretty well for video delivered around the Internet. It's relatively idiot proof.
Geeks want it to do this and that, or be like their Xbox 360 or XP Media Center or whatever, but honestly none of those things are as simple. I'll concede that you have to live at least to some degree in an iTunes universe, but as someone who is, that's a non-issue for me.
I dig it.