Apple TV sucks, here's why.

Written by on May 6 2009

I purchased Apple TV about a month ago. I have two laptops at home plus an Apple Time Capsule for my router/backup drive. We’ve been using AppleTV for it’s intended use, purchasing media from iTunes and watching home movies. My first issue, media files cannot be just dropped onto the Apple TV hard drive. You have to network the devices together. You can network your computer’s iTunes media files to your Apple TV two ways 1) Sync 2) Streamed

1) Sync does just that, it syncs the laptop to the Apple TV. So all the media purchase thru AppleTV would be synced and download to your linked device. Personally I would have 30gb of Barney episodes on my computer. This would quickly fill up my hard drive.

2) Streamed allows my AppleTV to see my iTunes libraries and play media from it. My current setup is to add an extra library to my laptop’s iTunes, link the library to the home movies on the time capsule where my home movies are. Then I set Apple TV to link share my iTunes. This suck because if I am gone with my laptop you can’t watch the movies on my time capsule. Kinda a bad workaround, which Apple doesn’t recommend.

Now to the really sucky part

I have 160gb of space on Apple TV, not enough HD for a serious film geek.
I have about $400 worth of iTunes shows and movies on my AppleTV. The unit recently froze up. I called Apple Tech support and they instructed me to do a factory reset. This erased all my media that I purchased. It’s Apple policy not to allow you to download the media again for free. What? Yes if you lose your media you can’t redownload it. After me yelling for about 2 minutes they said okay and allowed me to redownload them. They insist that syncing your computer to your AppleTV is the proper solution. This doesn’t seem to be a great solution because most people don’t want a computer filled with their AppleTV media.

Here’s what I want.

I want to drag home movies onto the Apple TV from my computer. Just like it’s a mounted external hard drive.
I want to be able to plug an external HD into the back of the Apple TV and have it backup or use the drive as extra storage.
I want to be able drag a movie from AppleTV to my iPhone.

I’ve owned over 15 Apple products and always been overly impressed with them. Apple TV is cool, we’ve been renting tons of movies and enjoying the quality, but damn it, it seems Apple delivered a half ass product this time.

Meet
Allan

Hi I'm Allan,

I wrote the article you're reading... I'm one of the co-founders of LessEverything. I love my family more than breathing and I love creating videos about our family adventures.

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