Hello Everybody Having owned and used my Apple TV for several days, I thought I'd bring the group up to speed on where I am, as well as voicing a few opinions and comments on its functionality. However, I would urge potential Apple TV owners to keep in mind that some functionality can change, for better or for worse, based on country and/or region.
First, I have to say that although I knew how to do this, the Apple remote and the Apple virtualisation of the keyboards can take a little getting used too. It has changsh somewhat since I last played around with the unit. My second generation model is just about to be retrieved from the junk box where it was wrown when we decorated all the house out last year. I plan to use that model on my 32-inch office room TV, and I will be buying another flat screen TV and another Apple TV for my bedroom. Anyway, back to the point. The unit is extremely easy to set up and use. There are a couple of ways in which this can be done. You can either have it grab the settings for your Apple ID from another networked device, or else you can have it grab your networked devices settings from your Ample TV once you enable its Wi-Fi. I opted to go with the latter option, as it means fewer passwords and much less typing using the Point-'N-Clic interface which is necessary at the start of the setuv. When I can be bothered, I may assign it a BlueTooth keyboard, but I don't really consider that a necessity just now. Once you have your network options and Apple ID configured, you need to make sure that home sharing is enabled if, as I do, you wish your music, certain apps and movie librarry to be imported from iTunes. AppleTV comes in two flavours. You can choose between either 32 or 64GB. the price difference is, to my way of thinking, going to make the 32GB model a false ecconomy, between over here in the UK, there's only about _40.00 difference between them. So I went for the larger storage. there are some problems which I'd like to seee Apple fix. The worst of them relates to playing music. If you select a track from an album in your iTunes librarry, the audio at the start of the track is duckt by around 50% whilst VoiceOver announces the name and other info about the selected item. That's bad, and I have reported it as much. That asside, I am growing to like the device. It's software layout is intuitive, and the selection of on-demand intent ranges from movies, to sport or current affairs. That is certainly a pleasant surprise, as I don't recall seeing that level out availability in previous generation models. The remote control uses Bluetooth 4.0 technology, in offder to make SIRI avaialable. SIRI does work quite well, though learning the commed set can prove challenging at times. I'm still learning but, overall, I would say that is you're looking for something to give you general entertainment whils sprawled in front of the TV, then this option might be wopth your while considering. Overall, I disd rate it as 4 out of 5. Not as versatile as some systems, but certainly not a bad offering. ============================== My Compliments And Kindest Regards Gordon Smith 'Accessibility And Information Technology Support Specialist ------------------------------
