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Review: The New Apple TV -- A Work In Progress

Ask anyone who owns an iPod: a three-minute song eats up 2.9 Mbytes of storage, while a one-hour television show (42 minutes, actually) takes 483 Mbytes. A couple of movies here, the entire collection of your favorite singer there, and you can find yourself short on storage space.

Enter the Apple TV.


The Apple TV stores media on its hard drive and organizes it for you in way that is both friendly and familiar to Apple enthusiasts and their iPod-toting pals. This device turns your TV into an iPod with a larger display and a sound system. Forget the iPod nano. Thanks to the Apple TV, you can now have an iPod Panasonic.

Like a personal video recorder, Apple TV stores and displays prerecorded movies and television episodes. Unlike a PVR, it cannot record, and it only displays media (movies, music, TV shows, and podcasts) downloaded from iTunes. However, for media junkies like me, this collection of media can be substantial.

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