Apple has pulled another design and engineering feat out of its hat, or so it seems from the first reviews to emerge on Apple’s just-shipped Apple TV unit. Although Apple is now expected to produce dazzling products that everybody (or at least everybody who is cool) loves, Apple TV’s debut during Steve Jobs’ keynote was almost a non-event in comparison to the stunning announcement and demo of the lust-inducing iPhone.
Moreover, Apple missed its end-of-February shipment deadline for the TV unit, stirring fears (at least in me) that something was wrong with the device, which aims to allow users to watch PC-based video on TV. But, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg issued his review of Apple TV this morning, and it’s nothing short of a home-run rave.
Although Mossberg and his colleage Katherine Boehert quibble with a few drawbacks, most of which aren’t drawbacks (users can’t access iTunes directly from the TV set, the unit works only on HD sets), the review is a glowing one. An example:
In our tests, Apple TV is a pleasure to use. Setup was stunningly simple. We just plugged the unit in and hooked it up to the TV with a single cable (not included).
The New York Times’ David Pogue doesn’t gush quite as much, but he’s still pretty positive about Apple TV. Pogue likes the look of the thing in particularly, calling it “gorgeous” and lauding its superior form factor over the physical design of purported competitive devices, such as Netgear’s EVA8000 box . (Pogue concludes, rightly, that these rivals, which include Microsoft’s Xbox, fill different niches from the one occupied by Apple TV.)
Moreover, Apple TV works best with Apple’s products, such as iTunes, creating the proverbial walled garden. Still, Apple’s genius is not creation of new technology, but taking technology and making it easy and fun to use - think about how Apple turned the clunky MP3 player into a hip toy. Pogue writes
Apple TV offers a gracious, delightful experience — but requires fidelity to Apple’s walled garden.
Its rivals, meanwhile, offer many more features, but they’re piled into bulkier boxes with much less concern for refinement, logic or simplicity.
Pogue’s bottom-line: Apple TV is for the average, fun-loving, non-geeky user..
Apple, on the other hand, is going for everybody else, random people included (at least those with HDTV sets). And that, perhaps, is Apple TV’s real significance.
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:27 AM|Comments(0)
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