How refreshing. And how typically unusual. Rather than doing the usual, boring, upgrade – you know, the one where the new product is significantly better than the old one, Apple has reinvented the new release! They thought differently and released a product which is significantly worse. I’m talking, of course, about the new AppleTV. Sure, it’s smaller. It’s cheaper too. But they’d need to reduce it to the size of an SD card and price it accordingly in order to justify the loss of functionality. I like the iOS bit. I like the efficient A4 bit too. I could stomach a drop in capacity to 64GB if it meant having SSD rather than a hard drive – but they dropped the storage altogether, thereby making it impossible to use as a stand-alone HiFi separate.
You know what though? I reckon that His Steveness is probably using the last generation, and I reckon he’ll keep doing so. I reckon he’s quite aware how awful this new TV wart is – but that he’s gambling on the rock bottom price seeing it through. Well, fingers crossed – I hope that it bombs. And that they replace it with a device with built in storage. Until then though, I’ll be patching the hell out of my wonderful Mark 1 AppleTV.
Just a quick note on this old post. I actually quite like the new AppleTV now that I’ve seen it – it just isn’t a replacement for the old one.
The new AppleTV does a lot that the old one can’t – and, with hindsight, seems to be an early hint that iCloud is coming. The trouble is that the old AppleTV does a lot that the new AppleTV can’t do. They’re entirely different devices, similar only in that they both use your television as a display.
Netflix seems to be the biggest attraction for the new AppleTV. Because of this, and if you’re in the U.S. or Canada, the new AppleTV is the superior device. Netflix isn’t available anywhere else though so, for the rest of the world, the original AppleTV is still the better gadget.