OK, that being said, the Xbox is also cool–for gaming. It’s not nearly as user friendly for media. Those who think so are pretty short sighted or at least can’t see beyond their own nose. My 2 year old can operate the ATV (and even more surprising, my wife and mother and the baby sitters and my in-laws…). I think it’s great that people love their Xboxes and can get so much utility out of them, but they weren’t designed for the non-gaming or non-geeky crowd. I mean, play with an ATV 5 minutes and you’ll get the whole thing. The addition of iTunes and rentals (without the PC dependency) makes it even better as a stand alone device.

As I said, there are some things that could be better. I’d like to see the streaming net radio, and I would like to see interoperability with non iTunes sites in the future–I’m looking at you Netflix and Unbox. Maybe Apple needs to do some partnerships with those guys and others to own the living room, but they’ve done the best job so far from a hardware/software standpoint (example again – the thing is whisper quiet compared to the Xbox–actually it’s not even whisper quiet, it literally doesn’t make any noise).

OK, that’s all.

I expect RSS features soon on Xbox, now AppleTV have done it. Xbox Plays Xvid/DivX for example. a far more WANTED feature then many of the features the AppleTV does. It also does 1080p. It is a far more supirior device and the services matches Apple with there announcements.

Its all about the marketing.

James

Still, I feel that Microsoft have great tech, better and done before Apple in many ways.

In response to Brien’s Xbox vs ATV debate, your “PC->TV” argument is flawed in that (as far as I know) you require Windows Home Server to perform most of these streaming scenarios. That’s even more locked-down than others are claiming AppleTV to be.

To me, the only advantage of iTunes rental is that you can transfer it to your iPod. But is this really useful? If Apple thinks they can charge $1 extra for HD rentals, that would seem to indicate that the demand is for watching high-quality rentals on the big screen. This is the exact opposite of staring at a 3″ screen for two hours watching a rented movie for the first and possibly only time, and still spending the full $4 to do it. Do people really want to do this?

I can only think of one reason to start watching a rented movie and finishing it on an iPod: because something came up unexpectedly and I had to leave, and if I don’t watch it on my iPod then what’s left of my paltry 24 hours will expire and I’m out 4 bucks. Creating demand for something via the restrictions artificially imposed on it doesn’t seem like a sustainable model to me.

Apple will “own the living room” as successfully as the digital cable box has, and for the same reasons. It is a closed system that limits my flexibility and tries to lock me into one provider. Why must I hack the Apple TV to play my own divx videos? I’m guessing because Apple assumes they are pirated, and if I have to spend the time and effort to convert them to one of their arbitrarily chosen supported formats, I will just buy it from them instead. It is the same mentality that has failed the media companies for years. In the end, this boils down to trading one restrictive system that assumes I’m a criminal for a different restrictive system that assumes I’m a criminal. This type of mentality won’t give one company a monopolistic ownership of the living room. Instead, it gives the average consumer incentive to become hackers, much like DRM has provided incentive for them to become pirates. Most consumers are willing to pay a fair price but expect a reasonable degree of flexibility with what they’ve legally paid for. Media companies don’t seem to get this, and they are paying for it dearly. The ATV/iTunes/iPod ecosystem just seems like a new take on the same old mindset.

Now Apple products are not perfect and they do have issues and fail but I also know that the Xbox has had many issues. I haven’t seen the Xbox marketplace user interface but is it something that your mom could use?

The Apple TV is small, totally quiet and the software is menu-driven-for-mom easy to navigate. Apple is going after more regular people here, not just techies or heavy gamers.

With this release the Apple TV is not for just Apple users, it is for anyone with a flat panel TV.

I understand that gaming is a huge market but it does annoy me when gamers don’t realize that there is a much larger market of people who never have and never will play video games and therefore will never purchase a console no matter what other features it may have.

The new feature set and new price does make this an interesting opportunity for Apple to make big strides into the living room. While the Xbox has similar features, people over 30 probably don’t know about those features as they view the Xbox as purely a gaming device for kids and teens.

HungryFlix.com loves the Apple TV and the potential that it holds for indie content providers to deliver their works directly to the family room. It was great to see Jobs highlight podcasts again, and play an HD podcast live.

This segment is still young, but this is a great (first) second step by Apple.