My AppleTV review

So I decided that I just needed to own another Apple product.  It was the worst spur of the moment purchase that I’ve had lately. Quite simply a combination of great US => CDN exchange rate (I work in the states) and my co-workers rooting me on to get it and mod it.

Well I simply had to have it then.  I purchased it from Apple.ca and it was delivered promptly in 3 biz days. I then realized I didn’t have an HDMI cable, or so I thought, but ended up finding one after an extensive search.

I setup the Apple TV and enjoyed it for about.. 20 minutes, then it all began to dawn on me that I just bought a box for ‘buying’ from iTunes.  Basically I would sum it up as a ‘pay-per-view’ box, and my mothers repeated questions of ‘where do I put the DVD in?’ solidified my disappointment.  I ended up modding it to get XBMC on there (to mount my local shares + watch movies like divx/xvid/non mp4).

All in all, the box is amazing quality, and hey if I didn’t have a laptop sitting there hooked up to my LCD TV, then I would probly keep this around (it is cheaper than a laptop after all).  But the story is that it simply didn’t fit what I wanted, I guess I expected something more, but was too slow to realize what I was buying till after I got my hands on it.

Final thoughts:
If this came with a DVD drive built in, it would be icing on the cake and I would have kept it. But thankfully I am selling it to a friend of mine.  I would not really recommend this product to many people unless they are all about just buying / renting stuff off iTunes. Otherwise you will just watch Youtube videos and your photos off of it. Which to me is not a high selling point in the end.