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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).