It makes me sad when products that could have been remarkable, well, aren’t. Remarkable, as I have defined it, is when they would have changed the way the world does something. This latest disappointment for me happened with AppleTV
AppleTV is great. It lets you watch tv shows, movies, and listen to music all through your TV, by automatically syncing with your… iTunes. What? No DivX? No Xvid? No FLV (YouTube format… wouldn’t that be a trip?)? No hard drive bigger than 40g’s (Okay, so i threw this one in here)?
Just iTunes.
Apple missed remarkable by locking down their product to just iTunes. Sure, I can see some of the reasons for it, like greed (and others, of course). It’s really too bad, too. I think they chose a great price point, at around half the cost of their iPhone.
But instead they decided to miss some big opportunities, like becoming the hub for all media in the household, creating a real link between the computer and pc. Oh, the AppleTV looks portable, so they also missed the people who would have taken it to their friends to sync with their media and share (thus becoming social), it could have become a portable DJ box for parties by still syncing with iTunes, it could have been used at schools for teachers to stream videos, slides, etc to classrooms, at coffee shops to add an additional music experience, at gyms, etc. To their credit, they did create a plugin backend that will definitely be taken advantage of.
Still, AppleTV missed much of the same remark-ability that Zune did by locking down their product, thus neutralizing much of what could have been social. Zune locked their wireless, essentially, and AppleTV has done the same.
For even more evidence on how people really want to use the AppleTV, the real money that could have been made, and the real remark-ability that could have occurred, simply check these hacks out. Then again, AppleTV may be remarkable, but now it will only be truly remarkable to the geeks who are willing to hack it.
Apple TV is a platform. All of the things you described are software changes and Apple’s very good at doing incremental releases to provide new kick ass features. If you’re going to complain about Apple TV, you should take a look at the input/output formats that aren’t supported. Or the fact that it’s the perfect time to address an alternative to Tivo.
I think The Steve’s goal was to finally release a component to fit into your entertainment center. I think we need to be patient to see what his master plan is.
Thanks for the comment, jpeg :)
It’s true that Apple is good at doing incremental releases for software, but the fact is that they’re locking ATV into iTunes as they did their iPod. I don’t see them breaking from that kind of propietership seeing as how they haven’t even done it with iPod in terms of formats, which has been requested for a while now.
It is absolutely an alternative to Tivo, as it is to Microsoft’s Media Center. That is true. But it’s not a remarkable alternative, except maybe because of the plugins hacked, or stated differently: to those who are geeks enough to hack it.
I too will be interested to see how Jobs brings this all together. He could potentially bring a combination of things to be something interesting or remarkable, but my point was how he missed the mark thus far.
I still consul patience.
Apple doesn’t have enough resources to test and support all of the things we want on Apple TV. You can be sure they’re hard at work on a new model with slightly better features, and another after that.
Luckily the hackers will enable this little box to do just about anything you can imagine with some extra code and plugins. Perian drops right in to your quicktime plugins director. I don’t think Apple tried to ‘Lock it Down’ at all, however they probably were not fully expecting what is happening, with people putting up large bounties, to enable the most wanted features.
Stay Tuned, some fun things are going to happen with this product.
Hey LiquidIce!
Welcome to GiddleBits & thanks for the comment :)
I don’t know how much I buy into them not fully expecting what is happening. Steve Jobs is no dummy. I am sure anyone could have called Zune being hacked so you could transfer songs without any limits. Likewise, supporting multiple video formats is not a difficult thing. Not to mention, even if Apple was that naive, they had the previous experience of their iPod and the kind of video formats people have been crying for that to support.
But staying tuned is definitely something I’ll be doing. Fun things will certainly happen with the product. My skepticism is whether or not these things will be on Apple’s end, bringing their product more into mainstream, or on the hacking end, making this product a must-have for geeks everywhere. Really, what’s been remarkable at this point isn’t the product, but the geeks enthusiasm.