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Flame Artist by day. Proud Dad by, uhm, the rest of the time. Lover of everything Apple. Hater of everything Microsoft. Except for the Xbox 360 of course.

Feb 17, 2009

Goodbye AppleTV

I tried, I really did. Then I gave up and called Apple to take their underpowered, overprotected media box back. This is the first Apple product I absolutely and unreservedly hated. It made iTunes look bad, and that is one of my favorite applications.

Okay, so it’s hackable. But it turns absolutely buggy and crashes a lot. Plus, I don’t want to spend another night trying to coax it to do what it should do in the first place: play whatever media I throw at it, and iTunes syncing isn’t the way to do it.

Enter WD TV. It should arrive tomorrow along with a 320GB pocket drive. It costs £100 less than the 160GB Apple TV and it should play movies with popular codecs without complaining or transcoding. As a bonus, it plays 1080p instead of just 720p.

I really hope this is the answer otherwise it’s back to the Apple Store to buy another Mac Mini and install Plex.

Category: Apple, AppleTV, Apps, iTunes, Mac, TV

Tagged: , , ,

  • http://mamood.tv mahmood

    I must say that I have had Apple TV for about a year yet and forgot that I actually had it!

    The copying/syncing of the stuff to it is cumbersome that no one in our household had any inkling to actually utilise it at all. It serves as screen saver with the pictures it links to in my iPhoto library for the seldom chance that I actually press the wrong button on the remote control.

    If you want ours to take back with you and tinker with when you come over, you’re more than welcome to it. In our household at least, it won’t be missed.

  • http://haniblog.com Hani

    Thanks for that! I’ll see how the WD TV box works out first I think. My setup with a Mac Mini was near on perfect though.

  • http://www.zainals.com Moe

    im not a fan of apple at all, though i might get one of the machines for designing purposes.

    Once you get that blackBox, write up a review, it looks interesting…
    thanks for the headsup!

  • http://haniblog.com Hani

    I’ll definitely post my thoughts on the WD TV soon. It’s very very impressive for something so tiny!

Hi. I'm Hani and this is my blog. I also have some photos on Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, tweets on Twitter and generalities on Facebook as well. Most of the time I can be found at Prime Focus in London, crafting commericals using Flame.

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