In the TG Lab: Second Generation Apple TV

[Rob Williams]

It took a month from the time of Apple's announcement, but the second generation Apple TV has finally begun shipping to customers worldwide. We've been using ours for the past couple of days, and are preparing to publish our full review next week. But for now, I'll give some quick impressions.

Typical of Apple, the latest generation Apple TV is small, capable of literally fitting in the palm of your hand. But despite that, the unit is very sturdy and doesn't feel cheap in any way. The top and bottom are a smooth matte plastic, while the sides are comprised of a glossy plastic. Yes, the plastic that attracts dust within seconds of being exposed to the air. At least in this house.

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Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Greg King]

I cannot wait to hear your opinion of this hardware. I'm curious to see how it stacks up against the Roku, PS3 and XBOX. While it never sold well, I never had a bad experience with the original Apple TV (my limited experience). I like what they are trying to do and the size of the new Apple TV seems right.

P.S. The Roku is the shit. I have an XD|S on the way to replace my old unit an I can't wait.

 

[Rob Williams]

I am not all too familiar with Roku to be honest, because up until recently, not a single one of the services it supports was available in Canada. Netflix just got here a couple of weeks ago, and if not for that, I wouldn't have anything to test but iTunes on the Apple TV. I haven't tested out Netflix on either the PS3 or Xbox, but I can't see the experiencing beating out the Apple TV though.

All in all, I have to say that I'm quite impressed with the latest Apple TV. It has obvious downsides, and if I had to choose just one player, I'd still jump at the WD TV Live Plus. Apple's device is best just for iTunes, Netflix and then other Web services, along with streaming content from your computer. No external storage and things like that hurt. I also figured that the 720p limitation would be a problem, but some of the movies I tested out looked good, so I was impressed there.

Watched a couple of movies and TV shows on it so far, and no problems at all. A movie I rented on iTunes timed-out the first time I tried to watch it, but after backing out and going back into it, it played through without an issue at all. The interface on the device is also the best I've used so far. Clean, simple, and incredibly fluid to navigate.

Apple did well here, I'll give it that. It's a focused device, but if you're an iTunes fiend, or just want a clean-looking device to play anything Apple-related or Netflix related, it's a winner.

Edit: I took a look through the Roku site, and it looks quite good, but I'm left a bit confused about what kind of support it has for video and audio codecs. It simply doesn't seem to mention that anywhere. It DOES mention that November is when support for that arrives though, so perhaps we'll see that then. If it can handle every common format, that could be a real winner.

 

[Rob Williams]

Ran into a show-stopping bug that's preventing me from completing the review. For whatever reason, the Apple TV just won't connect to my PC that has iTunes running, even though it can see it fine. Home Sharing is on as well... that's been double and triple checked. Might have to install Windows on a spare drive and see if it's my install or not. I could connect to this PC just fine with the WD TV Live Plus though, so I have no idea what the issue could be here.