The Apple TV falls flat like a Zune

The Apple TV from Apple (who else?) is a tiny device with a hard drive and media centerish features that plugs into your TV to give you the end all be all media experience but does it really? It can playback your movies, music, photos, display slide shows and supposedly supports HDTV resolutions. But the fact of the matter is the Apple TV comes up far shorter on its promises.

CNN/Fortune Magazine together are running an article about the pitfalls of the Apple TV and from that you can determine for yourselves what Apple could have done to make it a much better device.

Sure enough, the Apple TV requires an HDTV to plug in to but the video downloaded from iTunes is of so low quality that the images are as grainy as a regular TV broadcast. This is probably that biggest shortcoming of them all.

As I said earlier, the Apple TV has a screen saver feature which plays a slide show of all images stored on the device. It’s kind of cool but it’s almost as if Apple tore that right from the pages of Microsoft’s design manual for the Zune.

Content cannot be purchased directly from the Apple TV even though it has its own Internet connection, download what you want from your computer then send it over to the Apple TV, Apple needs to fix that one.

The Apple TV will only display images from one computer, there’s almost no rhyme or reason for that and I’m at a loss to explain it.

All in all the Apple TV is not a great product and it seems that even Apple admits it but not openly. When was the last time you saw an ad on TV for the Apple TV? Don’t know? Can’t remember? Okay, when was the last time you saw an ad on TV for a Mac or an iPod? I bet you can answer that one. I saw two just this morning.

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