atv_vs_mm Marketing research firm, Forrester, reports that the future may not be very bright for the Apple TV. If Apple TV does fail, my thinking is that Apple might have been too far ahead of the curve when they introduced the product. Among my group of friends, whether at Pepperdine, or work or church or family, I tend to be the gadget dude who has all the latest stuff. But when it came to integrating my TV and stereo with my digital content I bought an Intel Mac Mini last year instead of a less expensive Apple TV. I wish I could have used the Apple TV, but it just didn’t make sense with my set-up for the following reasons:

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  • 1# My TV is a standard-definition tube TV. I don’t have the right connectors on my TV to work with the Apple TV (three-color component or HDMI). Hell, even the S-video connector on my TV is broken. But as much as I’d love to jump to one of the sexy 40+ inch flat-panel (LCD or plasma) I can’t justify the expense given that my chief source of entertainment on my TV is standard-def DVDs and low-rez video-podcasts.
  • 2# No build-in DVD drive. As stated in #2, a good portion of my entertainment requires a little disc player. Ack.
  • 3# Mac & PC Gaming (via Boot-camp)... This is mostly theoretical, given that I have yet to play any games because I just don’t seem to have the time or hang with folks who are all about the gaming.
  • 4# Better media hub. Besides network connections I have more connections directly to my mac miniYourMacLifeShow on TV than available with the Apple TV for my digital content, most recently a 1TB external drive for ripped movies. I have an aging G4 which was originally considered for the media hub job but the G4 didn’t have the horsepower to run the DVDs without stuttering. Also briefly considered for the media hub job was my 2.80 GHz Pentium 4 PC in it’s beautiful clear blue case but the five fans were just too damn loud to tolerate. And with the Leopard upgrade to FrontRow, which works directly with DVDs ripped to hard disk storage, the Mac Mini totally rocks!

All that said, I hope that Apple TV succeeds. For folks who just want watch their downloaded iTunes content on their TV, and aren’t computer experts, Apple TV is a dead simple no-brainer. Their recent appearance at my local Costco makes me wonder if Forrester is right about the soon demise of the Apple TV. I’m anxious to see what digital-content-rabbit Steve Jobs pulls out of his hat at the upcoming MacWorld Expo and I hope that he blows all the experts away with some unanticipated device, Apple TV rev. 2.0 or something like that. That’d be awesome. Boys and girls, it ain’t dead just yet. JBB