Internet television, Apple style

From a consumer electronics point of view, Apple TV pigeonholes easily: It is a set-top box, about the size of a portable DVD player, that turns a wide-screen television or monitor into a hard disk-based media player and wireless streaming media receiver. It plays the video, audio, and images stored on any iTunes-equipped Mac or PC on your LAN straight to your home theater while leaving your computer hidden away in the spare bedroom where it belongs.

Further, Apple TV is nicely portable, so the next time someone invites you over and asks you to bring a movie, you can bring 20 or 30, along with a whole rack of music CDs. With Apple TV, a power cord, one skinny HDMI digital video/audio cable, and Apple's six-button remote in your party duffel, you'll never pay for beer and pizza -- or Veuve and beluga -- as long as you live.

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Apple TV can work for a living, too. Say sayonara to the tacky gray A/V cart in your mahogany-paneled conference room. Swap the one-track DVD player in your trade show booth or reception area for Apple TV and get random access to hours of promotional and educational content.

Soul of a media machine

If the simplest technology to use is the hardest to create, Apple must have poured a lot of brainpower and sweat into Apple TV's 8-by-8-by-1.25-inch box and its barely there remote. I suppose Apple expended half of that effort figuring out how to squeeze a silent-running Intel-based PC into that case without using an external power brick, and the other half carving away at the Mac software platform until it fit an embedded platform and a $299 price tag.

Apple TV is an Intel PC. It hides its PC-ness well and appropriately, but it uses the flexibility of a disk-based OS and software to great advantage. For example, whenever you put Apple TV on your LAN via its Wi-Fi or Ethernet interfaces, it checks with Apple for new releases of its software and upgrades itself automatically. Apple will use that avenue for bug fixes, but it can also enhance Apple TV's functionality by pushing a button in Cupertino. A free software update due from Apple in "mid-June" will add a YouTube streaming tuner, and it's a cinch that there's more direct broadband streaming capability to come.

Among the better heeled, Apple TV is every bit as simple and portable as I've described. In the ideal configuration, all it takes to bring Apple TV to life is a wide-screen HDTV or EDTV, or a monitor with an HDMI, DVI, or analog component input. For audio, Apple TV has analog stereo and TOSLINK digital audio outputs. Not everyone who has HD, or a suitably high-resolution LCD or plasma monitor, has wide-screen, so I found Apple's requirement for wide aspect-ratio monitors to be arbitrarily limiting. I found that Apple TV does work with a standard square-aspect (4:3 ratio of width to height) digital monitor, but the image suffered the horizontal squeeze that one sees when non-letterboxed wide-screen content is played on a standard-aspect display. Apple TV could and should support 4:3 monitors by including letterboxing in the software.