Apple TV – upgrade due soon?
By Ben Robinson on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 4:15 PM PST In Apple, Convergence, Hardware
New HW coming soon, just maybe..?
Those of you that are in to home convergence, and/or those of you who are singularly intent on an Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) ecosystem may derive some enjoyment from this post- and hopefully it will be of interest to others too.
The subject of the post is largely is Apple TV – and largely what Apple are up to with it, including whether we might see an upgraded version soon.
You see, I’ve been checking out the specs of the current high-end Apple TV hardware, and also reading reviews – and it would seem to me there are at least four areas where changes are needed:
- Bigger Hard disk
- Full HD support
- Better codec support
- Reduction in price!
I am very surprised to see the Apple TV box only has a 160GB hard disk in it’s more expensive variant – I thought the commonly accepted mantra (certainly in other home AV equipment anyway) is that users are going to want at least 200GB, and more likely 320GB – and to be quite honest, I think the standard should be 500GB, with 1TB as an optional extra. Come on, most people have got LOTS of content of their own, and they should be able to store it on-device. Yes, I know, Apple TV can stream, but have you ever seen a completely reliable wireless home network AND a reliable server machine to stream the data? Nope, me neither.
In a similar fashion to the small hard disk, iTunes seems to have a case of ‘small picture’ – that is, we only get 720p on an HD TV, instead of the proper 1080p – and I don’t care what anyone says, you CAN tell the difference. The 1080p content I’ve seen has been on another level altogether, quality-wise. And don’t start thinking about 1080i – I’ve got two Home AV boxes, one of which does 1080i, and the other 1080p – and the latter kicks the former’s backside!
Codecs – a trivial word perhaps, but massive implications – video players on any IP-connected devices these days have to be a ‘jack of all trades, master of ALL” – that is, they need to have diverse, update-able, and quality codec support for most, if not all, the well-known codecs – which you could argue include 3GP, MP4, AVI, MPEG, and WMV containers, with the associated codecs for audio and video e.g. AAC, eAAC, MP3, WMA, H.264, WMV, MPEG4, and a literal STACK of others!
And as for the price, come on Apple – you make great kit, it works awesomely well, and has a great UI – but that price is at a real premium. I’ll let you hurt my credit card, but I can’t let you sacrifice it altogether! Other media boxes are coming in around half to three-quarters the price, with better specs…
Apple TV hasn’t been updated for some time, which makes me wonder whether next year we might see an upgrade in the works. The InterWeb has been abuzz with speculation as to what Apple might do, including things like:
Blu-Ray support
1080p capability
Added codec support
One thing is for certain – if the sales figures of Apple TV to-date have been doing less than setting the world alight, combinations of some or all of the above changes would lead to re-invigorated sales – so let’s see where Apple’s focus is in the next couple of quarters…
Apple tv lacked any credibilty when it launched with poor specs and avc profiles that made it useless, hence the slow take up and now that independents like PCHour are making inroads into the mainstream, Apple better pull their finger out quick.
On a side not, far as im aware, resolution has nothing to with quality. Saying 1080p looks better than 720p is a bit misleading (and cleary wrong). In simple terms, quality is determind by profile, bitrate per pixel and the encoders ability to do a good job whether it be QVGA or 28k (heres looking at you Red).
To some extent I agree, but then again…
1080p DOES look better than 720p on a 1080p-capable TV, because the 720p image is scaled by a non-integer to fit the screen. Forgetting profile, and bitrate (which clearly should be good in HD, but are variably not), if you scale an image (or moving image) by a non-integer, all sorts of nasty things happen.
As regards the encoder, it’s much like profile and bitrate – you hope they’ll be good in both the case of 720p, and 1080p, but they often ain’t.
Ultimately, practically, and typically, 1080p does look better than 720p, because the content providers make more of an effort.
Oh, and the other thing is that something only looks good if YOU think it looks good – so everyone has a valid viewpoint
‘1080p DOES look better than 720p on a 1080p-capable TV’
True, but thats another story.
I bought a 720p tv because i couldnt bear the thought of watching over pixelated Freeview. Hope to ‘upscale’ to 1080 next year when Ofcom pull their finger out regarding FTO hdtv.
1. Blu-Ray is a competing technology which is higher quality, but lower on convienience. Apple TV is all about on-demand content and downloads you can take with you in your pocket on an iPod Touch/iPhone.
It’s a little like saying the iPod should have had a CD player.
2. The naked eye scientifically can’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080p content in most TV sizes/viewing distances. The reason Apple’s 720p content looks worse than 1080p Blu Ray has more to do with compression which strips away rich colors of the video.
I don’t think the “HD” content of Apple is very “HD” as a result, but I also understand they have to balance quality with download speed. I’d rather have a low-quality rental that I can watch instantly than a beautiful HD video that takes 20 minutes to buffer.
It will take time before we can stream TRUE HD content from the internet with acceptable download speed.
3. Since Apple TV can stream from your computer and computers are much less limited in their hard drive size and general storage capabilities (e.g. NAS capabilities), the usefullness of a big built-in hard drive for Apple TV is somewhat diminished: if it’s not on the Apple TV’s hard drive, just stream it from the computer seamlessly.
4. Greater codec support is surely a limiting factor in Apple TV adoption: the iPod let you rip CD’s and take that music with you, but there’s no simple legal way to do this with DVD’s.
I think the limitation is imposed more by the movie industry than Apple, unfortunately.
In my opinion, what the Apple TV needs is not any of the above, but a Wii-style remote (which Apple actually patented a while back) and the capability to download games from an Apple TV “App Store”.
I think the unit would do well as a casual gaming platform/on-demand media streamer.
I want to see some sort of subscription based service with unlimited streaming rentals or something like that. (like netflix) $4 per rental is kind of a joke to me as is the $2 per episode price when we can watch free content on the networks sites or Hulu. Is this direction a possibility in Apple’s future?
A larger internal drive would be nice, but what I’d really like is a working FW800 or eSATA port so I can hang 4TB of storage on if I want.
I’d also like support for Apple’s wireless keyboard so that searches are easier – and some finer controls during playback.
Other than that, I love the appliance.
I love my Apple TV for it’s simplicity, and because it’s a great way to stream my photos and home videos to the big screen, but I’m really frustrated with the movie selection. TV show selection is actually pretty good, but the movie selection is terrible, and doesn’t seem to be getting much better. I don’t see Apple TV really taking off until they dramatically improve the selection of movies, as well as other media.
I don’t care about access to Hulu. I’d rather watch stuff on my Tivo and skip through the ads or even pay for shows on iTunes than suffer through ads on Hulu. I haven’t watched an ad in two years, and I’m not about to start now just because shows are available on the net for free.
Yes I think they should continue to evolve this platform. I love mine!
The Apple TV uses PATA hard drives, and the biggest of those available right now is a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320GB 5,400 RPM drive. So I assume this is the biggest disk they could offer at the moment on the high end. I think they should upgrade from the 160GB to either a 250GB or 320GB drive, whichever keeps the price slightly under control. And yes, continue to upgrade this over time. At some point in the near future they should switch from PATA to SATA though since that’s where the laptop drive evolution is occuring–you can get a 500GB drive in SATA today, but not PATA.
Personally, the biggest thing I want is access to hulu.com, and maybe video from the network websites themselves as well, especially the ones that aren’t participating in hulu, so CBS and ABC especially. Yes these are Flash, but they’re really h.264 codec video that the Apple TV can already handle.