Confession: I hate my Apple TV

With the latest price drop I was considering picking one up, after reading this (and many other) posts and blogs... FORGET IT. I will save my money!

I've been a Mac owner since the days of the II (not the IIe but the original II !!) I've made it thru Lisa, the early Macs, the Pizza Box servers in the early 90's when we first put our businesses on the internet, and a myriad of Apple equipment running on two continents, operating as a single network, with nodes in more employee's homes than I can readily remember. Yes, I know Apple hardware and software quite well. And today as both Apple and I become distinctly middle aged (well, middle if we're counting one at least 130 for a lifespan and I am!) the ONLY Apple Product I ever purchased myself that I truly didn't like is that damned Apple TV I bought on a whim one afternoon at an Apple Store opening. Had I spent $50/more I could have had a nice little Mini, connected it to my 50" HDTV in the bedroom, and pointed it toward content providers of MY CHOICE, including Apple's iTune Store. But I didn't realize how bad or how slow the Apple TV would be and I thought I'd be 'okay' with just iTunes as my content provider. WRONG! The movies they offer are painfully out of date, they charge extra for an HD version, I can rent movies cheaper almost anywhere else, the network connection only runs on 802.11 b/g and NOT the N speed my network is capable of, hence the bandwidth is used poorly and the connectivity is sketchy at best. Forget using it wirelessly. If you can hardwire the beast it does improve the performance by quite a bit. I dropped a CAT 6 loop from my Apple TV back to my Apple Airport Extreme figuring I'd get at least the 1000meg/sec connection. And I did. Until anyone else goes onto the network at 100meg/sec or 10meg/sec and then the whole network slows down. A switch and isolating the 10/100's from the 1k/gigabyte ethernet will probably help, but what a hassle for a total of seven devices hardwired in the house! The implementation of it's features and hardware is just piss poor. No excuse for it. The tech is here and used properly in almost all of Apple's other offerings. Except this red-headed stepchild of a product. I finally gave up and disconnected the damned thing from my network and now leave my DVR from Direct TV plugged into the cat six drop I installed for my Apple TV. Why? Because the Apple TV product is so bad I generally cannot use it or dont' want to put up with the slow download and streaming enough to use it. I'd sell it on ebay cheap but hate to do that to a stranger who's never wished me any malice! (grin)

Can they improve it? Yes, with a major software re-write the power in the machine is clearly there. Will they do it? I do NOT know. I hope so. Pity the product has been crucified by the very company that designed it. With the damage done to it's reputation and legions of dissatisfied users, Apple has to either fix the damned things or start offering major credits toward something (anything) else!

Poor little machine and it's pathetic interface and that remote is a joke. Gawd can't Apple's tech people figure that out BEFORE they send it out into the world of unsuspecting faithful users?

Disappointed as hell...

M

I cannot help but think you are not real bright... who would EVER think they could stream HD or even SD content reliably on the 2.4 ghz bands like G? Also, you were NEVER able to sync your iTunes to the ATV??!! I don't even own a real Mac (mini 9 and EFix boxes) and I use an old XP laptop with a 4TB array hanging off it to sync with all 3 of my 40gb ATV unit on three different floors of the house via a desicated 5ghz band N wireless network and it works wonderfully. Every once in a while one will hang, etc but I just reboot it. My 6 year old daughter can run any of them flawlessly... And my iTunes downloads are to the dedicated laptop but I know I need good bandwidth so I pay for the 12Mbs pipe... it's quite fast. As for the video quality it's fantastic on my three HDTV sets (32,42,50). Perhaps you are sitting too close... Only 1080p is going to look great on a 50+ set when you are 6 feet from it...

It's too bad you had such a bad experience but it wasn't the AppleTVs fault... that's for sure...

We really like ours. It is not perfect. Having the remote app on iPhone fixed my biggest beef, no keyboard, also the control is better than the stick. It does get sluggish if syncing media and trying to play it. Needs more horsepower. Adding Boxee was a lot of fun. Now I plan a Mac Mini media hub with AppleTV satellites, EyeTV, and Time Capsule backup. Cost is much lower than doing a media stack for each room.

Thanks for the advice on Popcorn Hour. When they release the new one, I think I will migrate to that from AppleTV.

I thought of another thing, Atv can't even remember a wifi password. What kind of bull is that? Also, to the people who say it's network issues (ie other equip, I run an Airport Extreme (2nd worst apple purchase, new firmware is a disaster, a little better with previous) and Atv disconnects all the time.

Here is a solution for most of your problems for people with desktops. stop trying to add stuff to your AppleTV. Just stream it and it makes life so easy. The only time you ever need to sync content is if you are gonna have your system down.

I always wondered why people where so caught up with purchasing large AppleTV hard drives when you don't really need it. As for video quality. If you have a crappy video file you bet it will look crappy on the AppleTV, what else would you expect. But, high quality video looks great.

The only thing that I am upset about AppleTV is the updates. They could come a little sooner and the other is in the main menu. I would like my library to be at the top. I am not interested in purchasing or renting movies.

A netflix add on would be cool as well.

Count me in the hater column. But what I hate the most were the video podcasters out there (yes, I'm talking about you Cali) who played up, ranted and raved about Boxee on the AppleTV.

Granted Boxee is alpha -- and it has gotten much better than the unusable mess it was when I first installed it -- but it it still less than an enjoyable experience. But to hear some of the podcasters out there, you'd think it was the holly grail of a Media Center PC. Far from the truth.

I think that you have a bad internet connection. I download and watch rented AppleTV movies all of the time. The only trouble I have ever had was this week and I almost attribute that to the recent AppleTV update.

As for quality, you may want to take a look at your HDMI cable. If you picked it up for $1.00 on Ebay or Amazon that may be your problem. As for me, the quailty is exceptional. No grainy video or lag.

I do agree with you on two points however. First, I think that the AppleTV update with the computer should be voluntary. Having the device seek and update automatically is a bit troubling, since my music library is not always something that I change frequently. Second, the ability to play Divx,Flac is still a perplexing point for me. Apple will have to cave in, just as they did with iTunes and .mp3, if they want this thing to really succeed.

Y'all watch too much TV. How much media do you need? Let's see, each one of you uses Apple TV, Boxee, Bittorrent, Hulu, retail DVDs, iTunes movies, Netflix. You convert content, tag it, watch it and pet it. Then you take time to write about it. Unreal. Get a life.

I find that even SD content looks so beautiful on our 30 inch HDTV, we don't even bother to pay more for the HD versions. Obviously I might have a different experience if I had a TV with a larger screen but I'm really surprised that Aron thinks the video looks worse than 480p content from Comcast cable. As far as I can tell it looks nearly as good as the best BROADcast 760p or 1080i content, and not at all pixelated or jumpy (except when I hacked the ATV and put hulu on it which I decided was a big mistake).

What's going on? Am I blind or is Aron's ATV a lemon?