Apple Tries to Bridge Computer Desk, Living Room

29 Mar 2007 • by Natalie Aster

Digital photos, music and video all conspire to fill up your computer -- but eventually, you'll want to get those files back into the living room, where the big screen and the good speakers live.

Parking a laptop in the living room is one way to bridge that gap, but the electronics industry has been pushing another answer: a "media receiver" that plugs into your TV and stereo, connects to a home network, and plays your Mac or PC's media files where everybody can enjoy them.

Earlier attempts at this concept didn't see mass-market success, thanks to clunky setups and awkward interfaces. Now Apple is taking a crack at it.

Its new Apple TV builds on the lessons of those earlier attempts. It amounts to a technological inkblot: What you think of the Apple TV depends on what you see in this trim $299 box.

Is the Apple TV an oversize iPod with no battery life? Is it a 300-CD changer that can also play movies and display photos? Is it a tiny, cheap home computer that needs no maintenance?

The first question for any would-be Apple TV buyer, however, is simpler yet: Can you use it at all? It won't work with an old analog TV. Apple built this to plug into wide-screen, high-definition televisions. Apple TV includes only high-def video outputs, and its graphics are scaled for a wide-format display. No cables come with the box, so you'll need to make sure you get the right kind (component or HDMI) to connect to your TV.

If your TV passes muster, the Apple TV should be quick to set up. A review unit loaned by Apple needed minimal work: I turned it on, selected the TV's resolution, picked out my wireless network and "typed" its password by selecting numbers and letters off the screen with the Apple TV's remote. (You can't plug in a keyboard to do this.)

Your computer, in turn, needs the latest version of iTunes for Mac OS X or Windows. Apple says Windows 2000, XP and Vista should work, but it recommends only XP.

Then I could choose between the Apple TV's two setups: syncing and streaming. In its default sync mode, it copies one computer's music, video and photos to its hard drive over your home's wireless or wired network. Afterward, it doesn't need the computer or even the network.

In a streaming setup, it plays an iTunes library's music and videos, but not photos, live over your network. It doesn't need the fastest wireless technology: An old Apple AirPort Extreme base station had enough bandwidth to play movies -- one bought on iTunes, one copied off a DVD -- without stutters.

Switching from sync to streaming mode involved a minute or so of fussing with the remote and waiting for the Apple TV to change gears (except when it once refused to flip over to streaming mode until I reset the device and redid its settings).

Ideally, you'd keep an Apple TV in sync mode all the time, but its hard drive may not permit that luxury. Its advertised 40-gigabyte capacity drops to about 33 GB after you subtract space taken up by the Apple TV software. That's not much space for many media libraries today, much less after another year of squirreling away digital music and photos.