Product Reviews

The Apple TV is the latest gadget from the company that brought us the iPod. Unlike the ubiquitous portable music player, it's aimed at indoor entertainment. Essentially, this is a box that takes the content you have on your PC, in iTunes, and puts it in your living room, on your TV.

As you may have spotted, there are already a number of manufacturers offering this kind of thing, and of course you can also go a step further and buy media centre PCs that do much the same job (see Computer Buyer issue 194, page 60, or click Labs at www.computerbuyer.co.uk).

The Apple TV is, as you might expect from a product designed by Apple, very stylish. Its flat, square design and silvery plastics give it a highly desirable look that's enhanced by a front panel unencumbered by unsightly buttons or garish LCDs.

Socket to me

On the back, there's also not much to look at, but in this case that's hardly praiseworthy. There are only two video outputs, HDMI and component. This is likely to be a problem for a number of users, since HDMI digital video connections are only found on the very latest HD-ready televisions, and component video (not to be confused with composite) is hardly a popular connection on mainstream sets.

If you don't have an HDMI-capable TV, you can buy an HDMI-to-DVI cable to display your Apple TV content on a PC monitor. Or you can get a component-to-SCART cable to plug into a regular TV, but this will only work with TVs that support the Apple TV's YPrPb (as opposed to RGB) component signal over SCART, which is outside the official SCART specification. Otherwise, you'd need a box that converts YPrPb component to RGB SCART, costing around £50-plus. If you really wanted to, you could get a box to convert the Apple TV's video output to something that would suit any TV, but you'd have to spend some cash and the resulting quality might not impress.

The audio connections are more sensible, with standard RCA jacks and optical digital

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audio output. The only other sockets are an Ethernet port for wired networking, the power socket and a USB port. You'd think the USB port could be used for attaching your iPod or an external hard disk, but no, Apple says it's for 'service and diagnostics'. Which basically means it does nothing.

The Apple TV can also connect to a wireless network, and is even compatible with the draft 802.11n Wi-Fi standard for super-fast connections, although in practice these don't always turn out to be super-fast, especially when connecting two devices from different manufacturers, such as an Apple TV and your Draft-n wireless router. If you prefer to play back media direct from disk, there's a 40GB hard drive built in. Apple reckons you can get about 9,000 songs, 25,000 pictures or up to 50 hours of movies on this, depending on quality, but the fact remains that 40GB isn't a very big hard disk. If you want more room, a 160GB version is now available at £269, which seems like a better buy.

Media circus

In typical Apple style, setup is a breeze and the menus are elegantly simple. You can share content from any iTunes-equipped computer (PC or Mac) or copy what you want to the hard drive. Video quality is exceptional (assuming you're playing high-quality files), and the way album art is displayed while you navigate your music collection is well designed. Here we find another gripe, though: iTunes has to be running on your PC for the Apple TV to play its content. And while Mac users have iPhoto to display their still images, Windows users will need Adobe Photoshop Elements or Adobe Album.

A fundamental problem with the Apple TV is the lack of content to play on it. The number of films currently available for purchase from the UK iTunes Store is eight. As we went to press, Apple announced that users would be able to stream selected YouTube videos to Apple TV, with the site's entire content available by the autumn, which sounds promising. If you get your content elsewhere, Apple TV is limited to MPEG-4 or H.264 formats; any other video files will have to be converted first. There's no way of knowing what TV shows or movies will be available from Apple in the UK, or when; or if forthcoming digital offerings from the BBC and ITV will be accessible via Apple TV.

The Apple TV is ahead of its time - perhaps too far ahead. The user interface is excellent, but you'll have to make compromises to get much out of it. There are too many far more versatile media streaming devices on the market right now for us to be able to recommend this one.